Shock wave propagation in a double room model

Abstract

Nowadays, the safety of infrastructure and people is a primary concern. To ensure safety in public, industrial, or military facilities, it is necessary to be able to predict the behavior of shock waves in any environment. However, while the physical phenomena that occur in free field are well known, they cannot be applied to follow the path of a shock wave in a closed medium, where the phenomena are more complex. The aim of the present study was to define the origins of the different reflections and the path followed by the shock waves after the first reflection in a closed environment composed of two chambers separated by a wall with a variable opening. To achieve this, a fast code was developed based on the shortest path algorithm to determine the parameters of the shock wave at any point of a simple geometry. The code was designed from small-scale experiments that enabled the predictive laws of the distribution of maximum overpressure, total impulse, and the arrival times of the first four peaks to be established. An application of the code is presented in the last part of the paper.