Modeling solid Rayleigh-Taylor growth

Abstract

Intense impulses applied to solid materials result in high strain rates, strong plastic strains and significant temperature increments. Data in such regimes would allow confidence in extending material strength models to strain rates of 106–107 s−1. High explosives can be used to accelerate a plate with a perturbation on the side facing the HE, resulting in a Rayleigh-Taylor-like perturbation growth that depends on amplitude and wavelength of the initial surface perturbation, strength of the material, time dependence of the driving pressure force, and temperature of the material. Such experiments have been conducted on perturbed copper plates at LANL, using the LANSCE proton radiography beam to obtain multiple frames of data for each experiment. The results of numerical simulations of these experiments using a 2-D ALE code are presented.