Numerical investigation on the effects of several pressure media in a shock compaction assembly

Shock compaction is one promising technique enabling to produce bulk material from powders. There are many types of assemblies to be applied to achieve this purpose by using explosives. Of which, one compaction technique, using a converging shock wave, was developed and utilized for the explosive compaction of difficult-to-consolidate powder. In order to explore the optimum conditions for the powder compaction using this assembly, the shape of the pressure medium container and which material used for the pressure medium should be studied. In this paper, we made a numerical analysis on several materials as being the pressure medium and on the different conical shape for the pressure medium container. The selected materials for the pressure medium are water, PMMA and aluminum, respectively. The conical shape of the pressure medium container includes three cases of θ = 0°, θ = 20°, and θ = 30°. The numerical calculation demonstrates that as the pressure medium, the water has the best effects either in the peak shock pressure or high pressure duration for the powder compaction in three pressure media; PMMA can achieve the nearly similar effects to water; aluminum, as the pressure medium, almost does not have the converging effect for the shock wave; to the converging angle of the pressure medium container, the calculation shows that 20° can achieve a most ideal objective.