A coupled simulation of an explosion inside a lined cavity surrounded by a plastic compressible medium

The paper develops a coupled approach to simulate an axisymmetric explosion inside a buried lined cavity. The approach allows accounting for all the stages of the process: detonation of the internal charge; the shock wave propagation in the internal gas with further interaction with the lining, including multiple reflections; soil–structure dynamic interaction, including multiple gap openings and closures and wave propagation in the surrounding compressible plastic medium. The interaction problem is solved by a combination of the variational difference method and of the modified Godunov’s method based on the fixed Eulerian mesh with the so-called mixed cell. The contact pressures acting on the lining due to both detonation products and soil–lining interaction are computed through the solution of the joint system of finite difference equations of gas, shell and soil dynamics using a simple iteration method. Copyright q 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd