Sandia National Labs FY20 LDRD Annual Report

FY20 ANNUAL REPORT

Advanced manufacturing brings threat representative explosive systems to new scales. Researchers at Sandia pushed explosive designs to unprecedented small scales by employing advanced manufacturing and novel scaling approaches while preserving mission relevance. Explosive source term data is critical for development of remote sensing methods and phenomenological study of the available data. Historically, high-fidelity experiments have been prohibitively expensive.

By exploring limits of geometric scaling, costs have been reduced by over an order of magnitude per test with an increased responsiveness. Further, the reduced size enables colocation of advanced diagnostics and testing in a controlled laboratory chamber rather than in the field. The testbed is being adopted as an enabling capability for further in-depth phenomenological studies. (PI: Ryan Marinis)

Three scales of threat-relevant explosive source term fireballs (top row) produced by novel manufacturing techniques produced signals remotely collected (bottom left). Collected data is spectrally narrow and spatially integrated, showing relevant phenomena produced across scales (bottom right).

PI Theodore Grabowski led a significant LDRD project in FY20 that utilized the Hermes III accelerator, the world’s largest gamma radiation simulator. In this image, one of Sandia’s technicians arms a series of triggering lasers for a test.

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LABORATORY DIRECTED RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT