Plenary Speaker
| Plenary Speaker IX | Shock and Blast Interaction with Thin Films |
| Date / Time | 19 July 2019, Friday / 13:55 - 14:40 hrs |
| Venue | LT7A |
| Speaker | Prof. Andrew Higgins, McGill University, Canada |
Biography
Andrew Higgins is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He has over 25 years of experience in shock wave experimentation and modelling, encompassing shock and detonation waves in gas-phase and condensed-phase materials, with applications to advanced aerospace propulsion, defense, and fusion energy. His two most recent projects have been: (1) Developing a hypervelocity launcher to launch projectiles to world-record velocities (exceeding 12 km/s) for orbital debris impact testing and (2) a research collaboration with General Fusion Inc. applying the implosion of liquid cavities to magnetized target fusion. In 2019, while on sabbatical from McGill, he was a visiting scholar at UC Santa Barbara in the Experimental Cosmology Group, working on problems related to deep space flight. Andrew Higgins has a PhD ('96) and MS ('93) in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a BS ('91) in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign.
Abstract
The interaction of a shock wave with a density interface is a well‐studied problem as the Richtmyer‐Meshkov (RM) instability [Brouillette 2018, Zhai et al. 2018]. In RM studies, the presence of a thin film used to separate the two gases is usually viewed as an experimental inconvenience. In this study, the role of the film in suppressing instability is specifically examined. In particular, the influence of film thickness and pre-tensioning of the development of instability is observed for both supported shock waves generated in a shock tube and decaying shock waves (blast waves) of different strength.
