Design of a Simple Blast Pressure Gauge Based on a Heterodyne Velocimetry Measuring Technique

This report describes the construction, functionality, and optimization of a Photonic Doppler Velocimetry- (PDV-) based disposable blast pressure gauge. The gauge works on the principle that a blast wave propagating through a medium such as air, incident normal to a nondeformable disk, will accelerate the disk proportional to the difference in the pressure fields established at its incident and rear surfaces. To accurately assess these pressures, one can employ a computational method bounded by the experimentally measured acceleration of the disk within the gauge (Peng W, Zang Z, Gogos G, Gazonas G. Fluid structure interactions for blast wave mitigation. J Appl Mech. 2011;78:031016-1). The gauge was deployed in an experiment during which the blast pressure was measured from detonation of 114 g of Primasheet 1000 high explosive. The gauge reported similar results to continuum simulations using Velodyne continuum mechanics code; however, it suggests that Velodyne underpredicts the puck acceleration, and therefore the magnitude of the blast pressure front, by approximately 17 .