Granular material response to dynamic shock compression a study of SIO2 in the form of sand and soda lime glass beads

Abstract

There has been increased interest in the dynamic behavior of sand throughout scientific and engineering communities due, mainly, to its damaging mechanisms against armored military vehicles upon sudden acceleration from buried improvised explosive devices. NASA is also interested in the properties of sand as a stimulant for powdered planetary materials. This thesis focused on developing the experimental techniques to successfully measure its dynamic response to shock impacts. However, sand has widely variant compositions based on its geographic location and environmental conditions making it difficult to repeat experimental results. This research has examined the use of widely available commercial 'technical sand' composed of uniform sized, nearly spherical soda lime glass beads as a viable alternative for modeling sand. This allows for the repetition of experimental results independent of geographical location, thus providing a basis to better correlate and compare data between various focus areas of research. The objective of this thesis was to establish/develop the required experimental setup and procedures that will account for the inherent difficulty of experimentation with this material due to their solid and fluid like properties. Additionally, the first several Hugoniot data points were measured for this technical sand at pressures below one GPa.