Detonation Diffraction, Dead Zones and the Ignition-and-growthmodel

Of the various macro-scale continuum models of reactive flow in high-energy explosives, the ignition-and-growth model has been the most widely used. Well-resolved computational experiments with the model on corner turning in rigidly confined LX-17 demonstrate that experimentally observed dead zones (sustained regions of chemical inactivity) are not reproduced in the computations. This deficiency is attributed to the fact that the model does not explicitly account for desensitization caused by exposure to shocks of low strength. A modification of the reaction rate that takes account of the desensitization process is proposed. Computations of corner turning with the augmented model show the appearance of dead zones downstream of the corner.