Developing a Containment System for Impact Experiments

Over the years, there has been a significant amount of effort spent in coupling impact systems to light sources to take advantage of diagnostics such as X-ray imaging and diffraction, and proton radiography to study matter at high-pressures and temperatures. With these new capabilities, there is a need to develop a containment system for studying explosive, pyrophoric, radiological, and other hazardous materials. Current containment systems use explosive closure valves to achieve containment within a primary vessel which are costly and can complicate experiment setup. The objective of the current work is to explore the possibility of developing a passive containment system without the use of explosive valves for shots on a single stage gas and powder guns for impact experiments. A description of the capability developed for small bore gas guns (12.5-mm bore) will be presented along with recent experimental test results and the continuing work to scale this to larger bore or higher performance gun systems.