Energetic Dispersal of a Carefully Perturbed Bed of Particles

Accurate characterization of the evolution of a particle cloud following interactions with detonation waves and contact interfaces is a challenging problem for simulations and experiments. In experiments, precise descriptions of the initial states of the explosive and the surrounding particle bed are hard to achieve. Also, diagnostic tools and data for early times following detonation are limited. In simulations, modeling the particle compaction regime is difficult and the uncertainties of other physical models are hard to quantify under extreme conditions. This work makes use of Eulerian-Lagrangian, compressible flow simulations to analyze the effects of carefully designed perturbations to a uniformly distributed but initially low volume fraction particle bed surrounding an explosive. The analysis focuses on the sequence of events, multiphase instabilities and late time behavior displayed by the particle cloud. Inspired by behaviors of two-fluid instabilities, increasingly complex perturbations are used to unravel the effects of the initial particle distribution.