SDRD Highlight: Dale Turley wins MVPI with Bubble Collapse project

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The Special Technologies Laboratory’s Dale Turley is the winner of the fiscal year 2022 Most Valuable Principal Investigator (MVPI) award for his SDRD project “Study of Bubble Collapse in Optically Transparent High Explosive as a Method to Probe the Detonation Process” (22-052). Dale’s project examined what happens to a butane gas bubble when injected into homogeneous explosive nitromethane (NM) revealing the effects of hot-spot formation on the detonation process. While previous studies have examined bubble collapse in NM, this work clearly shows evidence that the detonation process occurs near the bubble collapse and what happens when a detonation shock wave overtakes the butane bubble. This remarkable project already has a manuscript being written for publication and hopes to send its own shockwaves throughout the scientific community. The External Advisory Board lauded this project for its “clever experimental setup [and] great visualizations [that] could lead to improved modeling capability.”

black and white filmstrip images with red arrows to illustrate the bubble collapse project — Comparison of images captured for shocked and detonating NM without (top row) and with butane bubbles (bottom row).

Congratulations to Dale on his fantastic project and MVPI win!

This and other outstanding SDRD projects are highlighted in the SDRD Annual Report Overview, now available on NNSS.gov.