Propagation of Blast Waves in a Rotating Shock Tube: Comparison Between Eulerian Hydrocodes

The Superfuge facility at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) consists of a long metal arm rotating at high speeds. A test unit attached to the end of the arm is subjected to large inertial accelerations in addition to other possible environments. There has been recent interest in investigating the feasibility of attaching a small shock tube to the Superfuge arm that rotates with the test unit to impart blast loading. We present the results of an investigation using three-dimensional hydrocode simulations to study the explosive blast wave propagation in such a rotating shock tube. Despite the seemingly slow speeds of the rotating tube compared to the wave speeds, we find that the rotation, indeed, affects the pressure-time history along the tube. The rotating tube in an Eulerian frame also presents unique challenges to hydrocode simulations as they require material rotations across fixed grid cells. To this end, we also compare the accuracy and performance of running this problem using the SNL hydrocodes CTH (CHART-D to the Three Halves) and SABLE (Shock Adaptive BLock Eulerian). SABLE, a structured finite element method (FEM) based shock physics code with pervasive Adaptive Mesh Refinement that is currently under active development and in production use, simulated this rotating shock tube via a boundary rotation feature enhancement. SNL is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525.