IMPROVEMENTS IN THIN-PULSE SHOCK INITIATION THRESHOLD MEASUREMENTS “Work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract number W-7405-ENG-48”

At LLNL we have been evaluating shock-initiation thresholds for various explosives for a number of years, using thin flyer plates accelerated by an electric gun as the shock stimulus 1, 2, 3. It is advantageous in time and expense to minimize the number of test specimens required for a threshold determination. We have recently improved our velocity calibration and our experimental protocol in selecting firing voltages so that we can usually obtain a good estimate of the threshold using only 8-10 samples.