Spall Effects on Infrasound Generation

Abstract:

Spall effects from buried explosions are seen in near-source surface accelerations and depend on explosion yield, emplacement depth-of-burial and material strength. Investigations of infrasound from buried explosions have shown how atmospheric overpressure can be derived from surface acceleration through application of the Rayleigh Integral (Bannister, 1980). Recently, underground chemical explosions as part of the Source Physics Experiment (SPE) at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) have been shown to generate spall signatures in local-distance infrasound (Jones et al. 2014). We are investigating the effects of spall on infrasound generation using two approaches. The first approach uses the Rayleigh integral to compute overpressures for buried explosions from synthetic vertical acceleration data at surface ground zero. To obtain the synthetic surface accelerations we use reported models from nuclear explosion studies and systematically vary parameters such as the spall duration, depth of burial and magnitude. The effect on the resulting acoustic waveform shape will be investigated. The second method uses a hydrodynamic approach to more fully characterize the varied parameters to produce the acoustic waveforms. As the spall decreases we find that the acoustic waveform shape changes dramatically. This waveform signature may provide diagnostics on the explosive source and may be a useful metric for underground explosion monitoring.

This work was done under award number DE-AC52-06NA25946. Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.