Use of shock waves to temporarily increase the permeability of the cell membrane is a promising approach in drug delivery and gene therapy to allow the translocation of macromolecules and small polar molecules into the cytoplasm. Our understanding of how the characteristics of the pressure profile of shock waves, such as peak pressure and pulse duration, influences membrane properties is limited. Here we study the response of lipid bilayer membranes to shock pulses with different pressure profiles using atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. From our simulation results, we find that the transient deformation/disordering of the membrane depends on both the magnitude and the pulse duration of the pressure profile of the shock pulse. For a low pressure impulse, peak pressure has a dominant effect on membrane structural changes, while for the high pressure impulse, we find that there exists an optimal pulse duration at which membrane deformation/disordering is maximized.

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the performance of coated laminated safety glass panels under extreme temperatures and blast loading. Using a shock tube apparatus, specimens were evaluated under room temperature (25°C), low temperatures (-10 and 0°C), and high temperatures (50, 80, 110°C). Special environmental chambers were designed to heat up and cool down the panels to the required temperatures prior to blast loading. To mimic real applications for glass windows, specimens were clamped fully along the boundaries during experimentation. For each experiment, the incident and reflected shock wave pressure profiles were recorded using pressure transducers located on the muzzle of the shock tube. The real-time deformation of the sandwich specimens was recorded using two high-speed cameras. Three-dimensional digital image correlation was used to analyze the high-speed images and compute the full-field deformation, in-plane strains, and velocities during the blast-loading event. A post-mortem study of the sandwich specimen was performed to investigate the effectiveness of such materials under different temperatures to withstand these shock loads. Experiments were conducted to characterize the tensile behavior of the coating material as a function of temperature. The mechanisms of failure of the panel are in agreement with the failure mechanisms outlined for laminated safety glass (LSG) in previous studies. The results indicated that polymeric thin sheet coating on both outer faces of the LSG panel had major influence on mitigating the blast loading and containing the glass fragments. The composite panel showed great endurance during the blast loading for temperatures from 0 to 80°C. The failure of panel at -10°C is attributed to the glass transition of the coating material and the failure at 110°C is likely due tearing of the coating by the glass fragments.