Explosive Fragmentation of a Thin Ceramic Tube Using Pulsed Power

Abstract

This study experimentally examined the explosive fragmentation of thin ceramic tubes using pulsed power. A thin ceramic tube was threaded on a thin copper wire, and high voltage was applied to the wire using a pulsed power generator. This melted the wire and the resulting vapor put pressure on the ceramic tube, causing it to fragment. We examined the statistical properties of the fragment mass distribution. The cumulative fragment mass distribution obeyed the double exponential or power law with exponential decay. Both distributions agreed well with the experimental data. Finally, we obtained universal scaling for fragmentation, which is applicable to both impact and explosive fragmentation.

New Universality Class for the Fragmentation of Plastic Materials

“…Fragmentation phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and play a crucial role in numerous industrial processes related to mining and ore processing [1]. A large variety of measurements starting from the breakup of heavy nuclei through the usage of explosives in mining or fragmenting asteroids revealed the existence of a striking universality in fragmentation phenomena [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]: fragment mass distributions exhibit a power law decay, independent on the type of energy input (impact, explosion, ...), the relevant length scales or the dominating microscopic interactions involved. Detailed laboratory experiments on the breakup of disordered solids have revealed that mainly the effective dimensionality of the system determines the value of the exponent, according to which universality classes of fragmentation phenomena can be distinguished.…”

Emergence of energy dependence in the fragmentation of heterogeneous materials

“…the system undergoes a transition as the impact velocity is varied from the damage phase (v 0 < v c ), characterized by the presence of a dominating piece, to the fragmentation phase (v 0 > v c ), where no major fragment prevails. The existence of the damage-fragmentation transition has been verified for various types of systems both by experiments [3][4][5][6][7][8]13] and computer simulations [15,18,19,21,[23][24][25][26][27].…”

“…During the past decades research on fragmentation mainly focused on the statistics of fragment masses (sizes) obtained by the breakup of heterogeneous materials [1,9,10]. A large number of experimental [1,[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] and theoretical studies [13,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24] have confirmed that the mass distribution of fragments is described by a power law functional form. The exponent of the distribution was found to show a high degree of robustness, i.e., investigations revealed that the value of the exponent does not depend on the type of materials, amount of input energy, and on the way the energy is imparted to the system until materials of a high degree of heterogeneity are fragmented [1,9,10].…”

“…The value of the exponent is mainly determined by the dimensionality of the system [13,15,18,19,21,23,[25][26][27] and by the brittle or ductile mechanical response of the material [28]. The universality of fragmenting has been shown to be the fingerprint of an underlying phase transition from the damaged to the fragmented phase of the breakup process [5,6,14,18].…”

“…Impact induced fragmentation of heterogeneous materials is abundant in nature having also a high importance for industrial applications especially in mining and ore processing [2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. During the past decades research on fragmentation mainly focused on the statistics of fragment masses (sizes) obtained by the breakup of heterogeneous materials [1,9,10].…”