Modeling thermally driven energetic response of high explosives in ALE3D

The authors have improved their ability to model the response of energetic materials to thermal stimuli and the processes involved in the energetic response. Traditionally, the analyses of energetic materials have involved coupled thermal transport/chemical reaction codes. This provides only a reasonable estimate of the time and location of ensuing rapid reaction. To predict the violence of the reaction, the mechanical motion must be included in the wide range of time scales associated with the thermal hazard. The ALE3D code has been modified to assess the hazards associated with heating energetic materials in weapons by coupling to thermal transport model and chemistry models. They have developed an implicit time step option to efficiently and accurately compute the hours of heating to reaction of the energetic material. Since, on these longer time scales materials can be expected to have significant motion, it is even more important to provide high-order advection for all components, including the chemical species. They show two examples of coupled thermal/mechanical/chemical models of energetic materials in thermal environments