Manipulating shock waves with traditional alloying

Previous research has shown the potential for exploiting volume reduction during phase transformations to manipulate shock waves. Volume-changing phase transformation in metals can be described as metastable crushing at the atomic scale, which can reverse transform upon unloading. It is stable for finite-amplitude shocks and occurs on the time scale of tens of nanoseconds. The phase transformation pressure is tunable through the modification of the composition by alloying while maintaining a nominally uniform density. Through a combination of experiments and computations we have shown that laminates with spatially varying composition can be used to manipulate shock waves in ways such as converting them to ramp waves. This work explores using Fe-xMn and F-xV-xCo alloys with phase transformation pressures from 3-23 GPa to manipulate shock waves.