Simulation of an explosion: a safety issue

Simulations of the explosion’s effects help prevent and anticipate damage caused by industrial or armaments-related accidents, and thus optimize protection elements.

A wide range of private and public sector players can be involved: R&D departments of defense companies, companies that could be the target of armed attacks, or armed forces with ammunition stockpiles or firing ranges.

Three main services are offered to assess risks and damage.

Legend: 308 gr steel chip at 1348 m/s impacting a steel plate – Code David impact.

1- Warhead operations

With their experience and knowledge of warheads (explosives, coatings, relays, liner, confinment, reinforcement explosives, etc.), behavior laws and equations of material state, Geomines’ teams carry out operational studies to evaluate warhead performance.

Legend: pressure levels of detonation products at time 325.5 µs

2- Evaluation of blast and brightness effects

Using analytical and/or numerical approaches such as pressure, pulse or energy levels, Geomines evaluates blast effects in order to optimise pyrotechnic safety and ballistic protection. These studies allow the calculation of the impacted zones and the resistance of the protective structures. This field of terminal ballistics makes it possible to determine the necessary protections against impacts, at low, high and hyper speed (hollow charge).

Legend : Blow generated by an atomic detonation on an aircraft carrier (mesh size 100*40 m).  

3- Ballistics of projectiles and fragments

Geomines is able to determine ballistic tables based on incidence and atmospheric parameters in order to calculate ranges and velocities at impact.

Legend: Range of the base flake as a function of the elevation angle with an initial velocity of 810 m/s. 

Our added value

Geomines relies on the skills of atomic, ETBS-certified pyrotechnical and ENSIMEV energy engineers, as well as doctors who are experts in detonation.

To carry out these calculations and simulations, our experts can use most open source, public or commercial calculation codes, in addition to codes developed by our engineers.

  • David – blast code allows to perform blast calculations generated by explosions.
  • David – impact code allows you to perform impact or pyrotechnic building calculations.
  • David – slingshot code allows to perform ballistic calculations.

These codes, made in FORTRAN 2008 are in permanent development and testify to the expertise of our engineers.