Moderate Velocity Ball Impact of a Mock High-Explosive
Modeling of thermal and mechanical events in high-explosive materials is complicated by the composite nature of the material, which experiences viscoelastic and plastic deformations and sustains damage in the form of microcracks that can dominate its overall behavior. A mechanical event of interest is projectile interaction with the material, which leads to extreme local deformation and adiabatic heating, which can potentially lead to adverse outcomes in an energetic material. Simulations of such an event predicted large local temperature rises near the path of a spherical projectile, but these were experimentally unconfirmed and hence potentially non-physical. This work concerns the experimental verification of local temperatures both at the surface and in the wake of a spherical projectile penetrating a mock (unreactive) high-explosive at {approx}700 m/s. Fast response thermocouples were embedded radially in a mid-plane of a cylindrical target, which was bonded around the thermocouples with epoxy and recorded by an oscilloscope through a low-pass filter with a bandwidth of 500 Hz. A peak temperature rise of 70 K was measured both at the equator of the projectile and in its wake, in good agreement with the temperature predicted in the minimally distorted elements at those locations by a finite element model in ABAQUS employing the ViscoSCRAM constitutive model. Further work is needed to elucidate the extreme temperature rises in material undergoing crushing or fragmentation, which is difficult to predict with meshed finite element methods due to element distortion, and also challenging to quantify experimentally.