Experimental Demonstration on High-Speed Gas Gun Driven by a Gaseous Detonation

Abstract

A gaseous detonation is the explosive combustion mode which produces combustion products having much higher pressure than the initial pressures of combustible mixtures. Recently, it has been focused that applications of detonations for aerospace thrusters and industrial machineries, because detonations are able to obtain high enthalpy gases and pressure gains in a simple way. As one of another application, there is the driving source of an experimental apparatus. We focused the high-speed gas gun which is widely used for fundamental studies in aerospace engineering and impact engineering etc. We attempt to construct the compact detonation-driven high-speed gas gun which can accelerate a projectile to speed of 1 to 3 km/s. We demonstrated two types of the gas gun, they were the single-stage gas gun and the two-stage light-gas gun. In both gas guns, the driving source was the high pressure combustion products behind the hydrogen/oxygen detonation propagating inside the simple straight detonation tube. In the single-stage case, the launch tube was directly connected to the detonation tube. In the two-stage case, the pump tube was added between the detonation tube and the launch tube. These guns were used to cover the range of projectile velocity from 500 m/s to 2500 m/s. It was demonstrated that the detonation-driven high-speed gas gun has potential to be applicable for studies of supersonic and hypersonic fields.