blastFoam | JWL++ Reactive Flow Model

The Synthetik Applied Technologies team is excited to announce the implementation and validation of the JWL Reactive Flow model as part of our free and open-source CFD airblast code blastFoam. The JWL Reaction Flow model was developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and allows the addition of kinetics to detonation events i.e., the time-dependence of the explosive’s chemical reaction, while still enabling efficient, scalable calculations suitable for engineering and design. It’s addition greatly enhances timing accuracy and load characterization especially for near-contact explosive scenarios. The model allows mixing of unreacted and reacted materials within the simulated explosive charge and provides a reaction rate equation governing the transformation from products to reactants. It allows phenomena such as size effect (decrease of the detonation velocity with decreasing charge radius), and detonation front curvature (induced by edge lag of the front as energy is lost to the exterior of the charge) to be accurately captured. Advantageously, the model does not require pre-run calculations and can propagate in 3-D without the requirement to pre-define the path of propagation. blastFoam development is currently being funded under contract with U.S. Department of Defense, and the open-source public release code is available for download on GitHub. @LLNL #blastFoam #blast #CFD #OpenFOAM #opensource Videos of our validation simulations can be viewed here: References: 1. Souers, P. C., Anderson, S., Mercer, J., McGuire, E. & Vitello, P. JWL : A Simple Reactive Flow Code Package for Detonation. 5 (2000). 2. Guilkey, J. E., Harman, T. B. & Banerjee, B. An Eulerian–Lagrangian approach for simulating explosions of energetic devices. Computers & Structures 85, 660–674 (2007). blastFoam is available for free download here: Learn more about Synthetik Applied Technologies here: