Investigations into water mitigation using a meshless particle method

Abstract

It is very difficult for traditional numerical methods to simulate the problems of water mitigation which has been increasingly used to reduce blast effects. This paper studies water mitigation problems by using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), which is a meshless, Lagrangian method appealing in treating large deformation explosion events with significant inhomogeneities. Numerical verifications considering high explosive detonation and underwater explosion shock waves have demonstrated the effectiveness of the SPH method, the solution procedure and the code. Contact and non-contact water mitigation simulations have been carried out and are compared with the case without mitigation. For either contact or non-contact water shield, the peak shock pressure and the equilibrium gas pressure are reduced to different levels according to the relevant geometry of the system setup. An optimum contact water shield thickness is found to produce the best mitigation effect for a given high explosive charge, while the non-contact water shield, if properly designed, can result in further reduction of the peak shock pressure and the equilibrium gas pressure.