Talk by Kyle Hickmann (DXCP-8: Verification and Analysis, Los Alamos National Labratory)

9/24/2020  WebEx Meeting  3:10-4:00pm

Abstract:   A shock, in the mathematical sense, is a discontinuous change in a material state. Physically, shocks can be induced by high-speed impacts or explosive detonations. Modeling the physics of a material’s reaction to a shock combines the mathematics of numerical analysis, ordinary differential equations, and partial differential equations. At our national laboratories, shocks through explosives, metals, and polymers are studied by mathematicians, statisticians, experimental physicists, and engineers to better predict behavior in high-energy environments. As our ability to simulate multi-physics phenomena has improved, the importance of high-fidelity shock modeling has increased. Though shocks and detonations have been modeled at Los Alamos since the 1940s, new physics phenomena are constantly discovered through experiments. Mathematical models of new phenomena are then created and these models are included in simulation. In this talk we will review the mathematical formulation of shock phenomena and demonstrate some complex shock behavior through simulation. We’ll also describe a few of the key experiments used to study shocks and explosive detonation for a range of materials and discuss some of the open research questions in the field.