Scaling Relations for Combined Static and Dynamic High-Pressure Experiments

Waste heat – the pressure-volume area between the Rayleigh line and Hugoniot – offers a simple means of quantifying energy dissipation upon dynamic compression, confirming that (i) maximum compression on shock loading corresponds to the conditions at which all the shock energy goes into heating rather than compression; (ii) breaking a single shock into two shocks reduces heating, an effect optimized by the intermediate compression being about half the final compression; and (iii) static precompression further reduces heating upon shock loading to a given final compression. Combined static-dynamic experiments can thus maximize material compression by tuning dissipation.