A number of experimental models of blast brain injury have been implemented in rodents and larger animals. However, the variety of blast sources and the complexity of blast wave biophysics have made data on injury mechanisms and biomarkers difficult to analyze and compare. Recently, we showed the importance of rat position toward blast generated by an external shock tube. In this study, we furt...

We report on the initial results of experiments being developed on the Falcon laser to simulate radiative astrophysical shocks. Cylindrically diverging blast waves were produced in low-density ( approximately 1018 cm-3), high-Z gas by laser-irradiating Xe gas jets containing atomic clusters. The blast-wave trajectory was measured by Michelson interferometry. The velocity for the blast wave is s...

1 of 2 DESCRIPTION A 16-year-old male suicide bomber committed suicide with grenade exploding in his hands. On scene, the patient was found unconscious with bilateral amputations above wrist, was blind from both eyes and had denudation of subcutaneous tissue of the anterior thoracic wall probably from shrapnel. He had Glascow coma scale 6, he was dyspnoeic, cyanotic, hypoxic (oxygen saturation ...

  Purpose: In recent years high explosive bomb attacks have been increasingly directed against   civil structures by various terrorist organizations. This paper describes a numerical method for   assessing the interaction of high explosive air blast within the complex geometrical type of a   congested urban environment.   Materials and Methods: The first step in predicting blast effects on a ta...

OBJECTIVE Many troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have sustained blast-related, closed-head injuries from being within non-lethal distance of detonated explosive devices. Little is known, however, about the mechanisms associated with blast exposure that give rise to traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study attempts to identify the precise conditions of focused stress wave energy within the...

Explosions will, in most cases, generate blast waves. While simple models (e.g., Multi Energy Method) are useful for simple explosion geometries, most practical explosions are far from trivial and require detailed analyses. For a reliable estimate of the blast from a gas explosion it is necessary to know the explosion strength. The source explosion may not be symmetric; the pressure waves will ...

Blast has been the leading cause of injury, particularly traumatic brain injury and visual system injury, in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We determined the effect of shock tube-generated primary blast on retinal electrophysiology and on retinal and brain optic tract histopathology in a rat model. The amplitude of a- and b-waves on the electroretinogram (ERG) for both right and lef...

This study concerns the hypersonic flow over blunt bodies in two specific cases. The first is the case when the Mach number is infinite and the ratio of the specific heats approaches one. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘Newtonian limit’. The second is the case of infinite Mach number and very large streamwise distance from the blunt nose with a strong shock wave, or the ‘blast wave limit ...

Linear eigenmodes of a spherically symmetrical ultra-relativistic blast wave (the Blandford-McKee, BMK, solution) are calculated. The BMK solution is shown to be stable and strongly non-universal. It is stable because all the eigenmodes decay. Nonuniversality of the BMK solution (BMK is not an intermediate asymptotic) is a consequence of causality. In terms of eigenmodes – some eigenmodes decay...

— Highly variable γ-ray pulses and X-ray flares in GRB light curves can result from external shocks rather than central engine activity under the assumption that the GRB blast-wave shell does not spread. Acceleration of cosmic rays to > ∼ 10 eV energies can take place in the external shocks of GRBs. Escape of hadronic energy in the form of UHECRs leads to a rapidly decelerating GRB blast wave, ...