Uncertainty Quantification of Shock to Detonation Transition in TNT

The run-to-detonation distance is an important metric for quantifying

the safety and performance of a High Explosive (HE), while

Trinitrotoluene (TNT) is a commonly used explosive with important

industrial and defense applications. Previous work has calibrated

reactive burn models to match experimental data for the

Shock-to-Detonation Transition (SDT) of TNT and have shown good

agreement with the experimental results. The present works seeks to

understand how uncertainties in these reactive burn model parameters

may affect these predictions. A Stochastic Finite Volume (SFV)

approach is employed to understand how uncertainties in the model

parameters affect the uncertainties in the quantities of interest in

the simulation. These results will illustrate what variations could be

expected in the run-to-detonation distance for TNT due the uncertainty

in reactive burn models. It will also demonstrate the SFV method as a

tool to, more generally, understand how uncertainties in constitutive

models for HE can affect predictions of important performance metrics.