Shock tubes have been widely used since the 1950s to study physical phenomena such as shock waves, combustion chemistry, and the response of materiel to blast loading. Recently, laboratory-scale shock tubes driven by oxy-acetylene were described. It was estimated that these shock tubes would not have a significant “jet effect” of expanding gases following the shock front because the combustion ...

The loading conditions used in some current in vivo and in vitro blast-induced neurotrauma models may not be representative of real-world blast conditions. To address these limitations, we developed a compressed-gas driven shock tube with different driven lengths that can generate Friedlander-type blasts. The shock tube can generate overpressures up to 650 kPa with durations between 0.3 and 1.1...

The prevalence of blast induced traumatic brain injury in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan has motivated laboratory scale experiments on biomedical effects of blast waves and studies of blast wave transmission properties of various materials in hopes of improving armor design to mitigate these injuries. This paper describes the design and performance of a table-top shock tube that is more conv...

Compressed-gas-driven shock tubes have become popular as a laboratory-scale replacement for field blast tests. The well-known initial structure of the Riemann problem eventually evolves into a shock structure thought to resemble a Friedlander wave, although this remains to be demonstrated theoretically. In this paper, we develop a semi-analytical model to predict the key characteristics of pseu...

This study presents a series of shock-tube tests conducted on structural panels using ammonium nitrate fuel oil (ANFO) as the explosive. The characteristics blast waves propagating through shock tube were analyzed by measuring pressure generated at specific locations inside tube. extent differences in confined space, such tube, was compared to that predicted proposed method Unified Facilities C...