Course Tutor: Dr William G Proud
This course has been updated for 2012, and the revised edition is presented as Introduction to Dynamic Phenomena, advertised on our main courses page.
Course Aim
An introductory course suitable for scientists and engineers who are new to, or who wish to broaden their knowledge of the field.
Background
The history of shock waves, asteroid impact, natural explosions and blast waves.
Course Content
Explosive compositions and detonation: Detonation, deflagration, initiation, ignition; propellants and pyrotechnics; high explosives, primary and secondary explosives, thermal explosion theory. Modern explosives and their applications. Detonation processes. Demonstration of detonation.
High speed photography, experimental methods, ballistics:
Image: One of the most famous high-speed photographic sequences, a horse galloping, taken by Edward Muyybridge in California in the 1870's. A technical breakthrough in its day. Modern cameras can take images with sub-nanosecond exposure.
Demonstrations of cameras. Photoelasticity, caustics, moiré, speckle, shadowgraph, schlieren. Gauges, x-rays techniques. Effects of strain rate; Hoplinson bar; Taylor test; plate impact. Adiabatic shear, experimental observations of shear localisation; the Culver criterion. Classification of impacts; ballistic mechanisms; shaped charge jets; hydrodynamic penetration; the demise of the Shoemaker-Levy comet; the death of the dinasaurs.
Shock waves: Shocks in materials with strength: the Hugoniot elastic limit; brittle processes; glasses, ceramics, geological materials; ductile processes, metals; equations of state and shock-induced transformations: EoS for gaseous explosive products; hydrodynamic solids; Mie-Gruneisen's equation; shock-induced temperature. Phase transitions. Demonstrations.
Hydrocodes and characteristic codes for modelling shock problems: Lagrangian and Eulerian hydrocodes; application of modelling and experimental work to real applications.
Nuffield Students
Dr Bill Proud is the Director of the Institute of Shock Physics at Imperial College London, and has personally supervised Nuffield students for almost two decades. Find out more about Nuffield Students.