A New blast wave Facility at IUSTI Marseille

Abstract

A long duration blast wave facility was built in order to study human and material damages at distances relatively far from the epicenter of a high explosion. The blast tube allows one to generate weak blast waves with a maximum pressure ranging from 5 to 1000 mbar, and long time duration of the positive phase up to few hundreds of milliseconds. After about 150 runs, results show that the time duration of the propagation of the rarefaction waves in the blast tube is strongly connected to the time duration of the positive phase of the blast wave. We also found that the duration of the positive phase is weakly affected as one moves away from the tube exit.