High-speed launching of solid bodies

The authors consider some principles involved in creating high-speed flows suitable for the acceleration of solid bodies and a number of concrete driver devices constructed and used at the M.A. Lavrent'ev Hydrodynamics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The drivers and principles reviewed include acceleration by solid explosive detonation products; by solid particles using gas cumulative explosive charges; by escape of impulsively loaded liquefied gases; by methods using energy accumulation devices; and by a railotron macroparticle accelerator. The solid body acceleration methods developed at the institute satisfy research requirements in the study of material properties and behavior under extremal loading, and in the modeling of meteorite collisions over a narrow range of meteorite velocities. Simple explosive accelerators based on cumulation principles exceed the other methods in controlled physical experiments.