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Yeager, John D.

Publications and source records attributed to Yeager, John D..

Texture measurements on quartz single crystals to validate coordinate systems for neutron time-of-flight texture analysis

In crystallographic texture analysis, ensuring that sample directions are preserved from experiment to the resulting orientation distribution is crucial to obtain physical meaning from diffraction data. This work details a procedure to ensure instrument and sample coordinates are consistent when analyzing diffraction data with a Rietveld refinement using the texture analysis software MAUD . A quartz crystal is measured on the HIPPO diffractometer at Los Alamos National Laboratory for this purpose. The methods described here can be applied to any diffraction instrument measuring orientation distributions in polycrystalline materials.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Compressive strength of the plastic-bonded explosive surrogate idoxuridine under quasistatic and dynamic compression

Inert simulant materials, or “mocks”, are often used as surrogates for plastic-bonded explosives (PBX) in non-detonative tests in order to mitigate hazards. Mocks should reproduce as many non-detonative properties of the explosive as possible, including structural behavior in a variety of thermal and mechanical environments. Recently, the molecular crystal idoxuridine (IDOX) has been identified as an ideal mock for the main component in the explosive polymer-matrix composite PBX 9501, and has performed favorably under quasistatic loading conditions. Here, in order to assess robustness over a range of mechanical environments, plastic-bonded IDOX was compression tested from 0.001/s to 2000/s strain rates and compared to PBX 9501 historical data. Plastic-bonded IDOX showed good agreement to PBX 9501 across these strain rates, justifying continued development and production as a mock.

Burch, Alexandra C.↗

Predicting the effects of thermally-induced density gradients on the hydrodynamic behavior of PBX 9502

High explosives are often exposed to thermal and mechanical stimuli within normal and abnormal environments. These stimuli can introduce density gradients in the explosive charge but the effect of such gradients is not well-understood. The goal of this work is to develop a comprehensive methodology to model the evolution of density gradients under various thermal conditions and then to predict shock initiation and detonation behavior of the gradated sample. PBX 9502 was chosen for these scoping studies because it has a large coefficient of thermal expansion and because the available shock initiation data indicates that initial temperature strongly affects the shock-to-detonation transition (SDT). The multiphysics code COMSOL was first used to model induced density gradients in a slab of PBX 9502 with asymmetric heating. Then, the gradated sample was constructed in the Pagosa hydrocode to simulate steel flyer impact scenarios, with SDT and detonation propagation following a calibrated Scaled Uniform Reactive Front (SURF) burn model. Furthermore, the gradated material exhibited very different initiation and corner turning behavior compared to homogeneous materials, and the orientation of the gradation was also found to have some effect. The methodology used here can estimate thermomechanical response of the material for non-uniform thermal environments and compute the resulting detonation properties of the PBX.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

Supplementary material for manuscript: Microcomputed X-ray Tomographic Imaging and Image Processing for Microstructural Characterization of Explosives

This data contains the supplemental information that will be accessible to the public from the paper “Microcomputed X-ray Tomographic Imaging and Image Processing for Microstructural Characterization of Explosives”. The data set contains the reconstructed slices for the 3D images of three different high explosives including: HMX-HTPB, PBX 9501 and PBX 9502. The data sets are folders of reconstructed tiffs showing the microstructure (crystals, binder, voids) and a segmented data set of each. Finally, a .gif movie is also present that plays the slices sequentially. The folders contain the voxel size information. See the manuscript for more details.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗