Mitigating Plastic Response of Thin-Walled Tubes to Detonations

Kliulai T Chow-Yee

Dr. Joseph Shepherd and Jason Damazo

Ignition of detonable gaseous mixtures in pipe systems of industries, such as nuclear power plants can cause a detonation to form. Detonation waves can cause high increases of pressure that may lead to catastrophic failure of the tubes [2]. To reduce the magnitude of the adverse structural response, polymer materials have been selected for their shock absorbing properties to coat the tube for blast mitigating purposes. Previous research in mitigating blast shocks have been successful, this includes the utilization of rubber and polyurea for the coating of structures [6][7][8]. Our cylindrical thin-walled specimen tube is instrumented with 20 strain gages and 4 pressure transducers. A series of experiments have been carried out with stoichiometric amounts of ethylene-oxygen mixtures at an initial pressure of 200 kPa. The tubes were coated with various polymer materials and coating arrangements. The paper will discuss the results of the polymer coated stainless steel tubes.

This isnt the final version, but omg im really liking my abstract. Im enjoying my summer at CalTech a lot, socially and academically :]