The fragmentation of thin-walled Q235 steel shell under explosion

Abstract

Abstract The fragmentation of a shell filled with explosive is quite valuable for evaluating the killing ability of improvised explosive device. A typical explosive device with Q235 steel shell and TNT explosive is chosen to study the fragmentation of thin-walled structure. With sand recovery method, experiments are conducted to get fragments with the mass above 0.1g. G-S formula shows a better agreement with experimental results when predicting average fragment mass than Mott formula. Further researches show that shell thickness and length-diameter aspect ratio have great effect on the fragmentation of shell. Average fragment mass increases exponentially and total fragment number decreases exponentially when shell thickness increases, while average fragment mass remains almost unchanged and fragment number grows linearly when length-diameter aspect ratio increases. These results are very helpful for whenever academic study or real application.