Hemispherical testing of Combined Effects Explosives

A test has been developed to compare the equation of state (EOS) of an expanding explosive via cylinder expansion (CylEx) versus an imploding explosive. For the preliminary work we used a novel cast cure aluminized formulation that could be cast to shape. This avoided the time-consuming and expensive high explosive (HE) machining route. Furthermore, the test was designed to be made out of 3D printed plastic parts, and a copper hemisphere that was produced via spin-forming. While certainly not the caliber of a CylEx experiment, it did yied useful data that allowed us to explore a pressure and volume regime not usually measured with the CylEx test. Work is progressing to produce the EOS for this experiment and compare it to the CylEx EOS. Experimental data will be presented and we will discuss application and improvents that could be made.