Team Members

One of the biggest threats American citizens and service members face abroad is attack via an improvised explosive device (IED). While, American soldiers have recently developed better methods and protocols for detecting these devices before they can detonate, they often still pose as a significant risk to the bomb squads that are tasked with neutralizing them. In response to this, experts are now looking at using shaped charges to drive jets of incompressible fluids, like water, into IEDs in order to break up the components of the bomb without initiating a dangerous secondary explosion. My objective was and, as this project will continue into next year, is to discover what types of liquid shaped charges will produce the longest, best-penetrating jet for breaking up shielded IEDs (i.e. IEDs that are placed in cars, storage containers, etc.). I researched and intend to implement a 3-dimensional, purely Lagrangian, finite element, hydrodynamic code in order to model the jets produced by various shapes of liquid charges. Specifically, my code will utilize a mid-point type integration scheme coupled with a predictor/corrector solution strategy in order to yield an explicit, iterative algorithm that will accurately modeling a fluid under explosive pressure. The entirely Lagrangian simulation environment of my code will significantly reduce the time required to compute this model as it eliminates the complex and cumbersome remapping step of contemporary arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) codes. This may at first seem ill posed for the modeling of liquid shaped charges, due to the high deformation/shock physics that they involve, but recent experiments with fully-Lagrangian ballistic penetration environments that apply remeshing libraries have proven otherwise [2]. With the application of mesh healing and optimization packages like HealMesh, I will be able to effectively avoid extreme mesh distortion and thereby preserve a stable time step size in a purely Lagrangian simulation environment