Craters Produced By Underground Explosions.

Abstract

Extensive research activities in the field of blast loads have taken place in the last few
decades. There are many experimental results related to underground explosions. The mechanism of
crater formation is complex and it is related to the dynamic physical properties of air, soil and soil-air
interface. Studies concerned with the characteristics of craters caused by explosions usually resort to
dimensional analysis and statistics. Some empirical equations proposed for the evaluation of crater
dimensions can be found in the literature. Nevertheless, they were obtained for particular type of
soils, shapes of explosives, ranges of explosive mass and depth of explosive and they present
considerable variability.
The main objective of this paper is to prove the accuracy of numerical simulation of craters produced
by underground explosions. For this purpose, the numerical analysis of crater formation due to
underground explosions is performed with a hydrocode. Several numerical approaches are carried out
using different models and processors for the soil. Moreover, different alternatives for the constitutive
model of the soil are used.
In order to validate the numerical approach and prove its ability to model the crater formation,
comparison with experimental results is performed. Many simulations of the same physical model
lead to the same crater dimensions and a good agreement between the test results and the predicted
crater measures is achieved.