Shock wave generator (left); visualization of the shock (top right); results of the pressure measurements (bottom right)
Source: BAM
The shock caused by explosions can cause devastating damage to structures and injuries to people. Explosions and shock can occur not only in industrial processes involving flammable gases or pressure vessels, but also in the storage of hazardous substances and in terrorist attacks. Reproducible experiments are essential in order to investigate their effects. Conventional test setups such as shock wave tubes or the use of explosives have their limitations, which are overcome by the test setup described below.
An open-field test bench has been developed at BAM's Technical Safety (TTS) test site, which generates reproducible, scalable pressure surges in a short set-up time. For this purpose, an acetylene-oxygen mixture is filled into a cylindrical autoclave of the so-called shock wave generator (SWG) and detonated. The resulting shock then propagates in the free field and is measured using piezoelectric pressure sensors in the free field. High-speed cameras are also used to visualize and analyses the explosion event during the tests.
Reproducibility has been significantly improved through an optimized ignition design and more precise gas dosing. With this configuration, pressure waves with an average strength of 88 kPa were generated at a distance of 1 m, with a low standard deviation of only 2.6 kPa.
The SWG enables scalable, high-quality explosion tests and opens up new perspectives for safety analyses with less effort and higher data quality. It thus makes an important contribution to ‘safety in technology and chemistry’ and, thanks to its high reproducibility, can also be used in the future to validate numerical models and AI systems.
Test set-up for reproducible shock wave generation
M. Gerbeit, H. Seeber, D. Grasse, M. Donner, S. Grobert, D. Krentel
Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, Volume 98, 2025