Blog posts

2019

Estimation of Temperature and Pressure of a Constant Volume Propane-Oxygen Mixture

11 minute read

Published:

A recent project required a first-order approximation to determine if an explosive gas mixture would result in a tank rupture. The following analysis done in Python and follows Coopers analysis 1 It provides a reasonable approximation, however it is sensitive to the chemical reaction hierarchy assumed. The jupyter notebook used to perform this analysis is here. Read more

2018

Determining Fragment and Debris Hazards

11 minute read

Published:

When the United States Department of Defense Explosives Safety Board (DDESB) determines fragment and debris hazards they use a 6-step process based on Technical Paper 12 (TP-12) 1. In summary, this process finds the range $R$ at which there is a probability $p$ of a person with an area $A_T=0.58\,m^2$ $(6.24\,ft^2)$ being struck by a fragment with a mass $m$ and kinetic energy $E_{CR}=58\,ft{\text -} lb\, \left( 79\,J \right)$. The process is, Read more

Calculating TNT Equivalency for Incident Impulse

8 minute read

Published:

When you are conducting tests on explosives, a common requirement is to determine TNT equivalency. You can determine equivalency using all of the typical blast parameters measured. Peak pressure and impulse are two of the more common methods. Of the two, peak pressure is the simplest. Read more

2017

Analysis of Incident Overpressure Using Python

16 minute read

Published:

This Jupyter Notebook is a research notebook that I use to analyze incident pressure data from a blast. Table 1 below is the list of the data acquisition (DAC) channels, the distance from the $200:g$ charge and what is being measured. If you are interested in obtaining the python code please go to my Github. Read more