Implicit Shock-Fitting of Detonations in Condensed Explosives

We present numerical simulations of steady and unsteady detonations using the Moving Discontinuous Galerkin with Interface Condition Enforcement (MDG-ICE) method. MDG-ICE is an implicit shock-fitting method that detects, tracks, and fits all shocks and material interfaces as well as fine-scale features such as reaction zones by treating the mesh as a variable within an optimization framework. Unsteady problems are cast into a space-time formulation in order to accommodate material interface-shock interactions with non-trivial and dynamic topology. We apply MDG-ICE to the simulation of multi-dimensional unsteady detonation problems using realistic equations of state and material strength models. We assess its ability to detect, fit, and track shock waves and thin reaction zones in the high explosive as well as the material interface with an inert confining material along with all reflected and transmitted waves. We will quantify the resulting reduction in grid resolution requirements in comparison to traditional hydrodynamic methods as well as the overall simulation time compared to production hydrocodes.