Communications of the ACM
Mobile Mayhem
University of Utah researchers are using the University of Tennessee's Cray XT5 Kraken supercomputer to simulate burning and detonation processes in transportable explosives.
Recent simulations have indicated that the key to preventing disastrous detonations is to pack the trucks transporting the explosives so that the temperatures and pressures are vented to prevent a chain-reaction explosion-to-detonation scenario. "We want to really understand the nature of this kind of accident and devise ways to design trucks and package the explosives so that this doesn't happen again," says Utah researcher Charles Wight, referring to the 2005 Spanish Fork Canyon, Utah incident in which a truck carrying 35,500 pounds of explosives overturned and exploded.
Using Kraken, the researchers have developed models for the transition from deflagration to detonation. "To properly model a full detonation, we have to get to the micrometer scale to model what's happening inside individual explosives," says Utah researcher Martin Berzins.
The researchers are running the simulations with the Uintah scientific computing and engineering program. "We've run our software on almost all of Kraken in a scalable way with good results with adaptive meshes--where all the action is, where there are high gradients of pressure and temperature," Berzins says.
From National Institute for Computational Sciences
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