Effect of shock impedance of mesoscale inclusions on the shock-to-detonation transition in liquid nitromethane

Abstract

Two-dimensional, meso-resolved numerical simulations are performed to investigate the effect of shock impedance of mesoscale inclusions on the shock-to-detonation transition (SDT) in liquid nitromethane (NM). The shock-induced initiation behaviors resulting from the cases with NM mixed with randomly distributed, 100-μm-sized air-filled cavities, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), silica, aluminum (Al), and beryllium (Be) particles with various shock impedances are examined. In this paper, hundreds of inclusions are explicitly resolved in the simulation using a diffuse-interface approach to treat two immiscible fluids. Without using any empirically calibrated, phenomenological models, the reaction rate in the simulations only depends on the temperature of liquid NM. The sensitizing effect of different inclusion materials can be rank-ordered from the weakest to the strongest as PMMA → silica → air → Al → Be in the hot-spot-driven regime of SDT. Air-filled cavities have a more significant sensitizing effect than silica particles, which is in agreement with the experimental finding. For different solid-phase inclusions, hot spots are formed by Mach reflection upon the interaction between the incident shock wave and the particle. The sensitizing effect increases roughly with the shock impedance of the inclusion material. More details of the hot-spot formation process for each solid-phase inclusion material are revealed via zoom-in simulations of a shock passing over a single particle.