blastFoam: Modeling the Development and Behavior of Richtmyer-Meshkov, Rayleigh-Taylor, and Kelvin-Helmholtz Instabilities

“The study of blast waves would be much simpler if high explosives behaved as consistently and smoothly as our one-dimensional models tell us they do. The real world is not so simple or smooth.”

Charles E. Needham, Blast Waves

The effects of these instabilities can be significant*, especially in the near-field for solid explosives, with high-velocity jetting of detonation products resulting in large variations in pressure and flow direction. Their formation is calculable, but the exact position on a given experiment is not.

*2x difference in peak pressure measurements observed during explosive tests.

blastFoam is available for free download here: https://github.com/synthetik-technolo...

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blastFoam calculation run on the Frontera Supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)