Warhead Design
- Novel concepts for explosively- and magnetically-formed shaped charges, self-forging penetrators, and aimable fragmenting warheads.
- Warhead concepting and design to provide multiple mode and combined effects lethality for soft and hard target applications.
- Generation of lethal kinetic energy mass using electromagnetic energy sources such as flux compression generators.
High Pressure Behavior of Materials
- Predictions from first principles of the high-pressure static and dynamic behavior of metals, polymers, porous materials, explosives, and reactive materials.
- Equations of state of metals, polymers, porous materials, explosives, and non-explosive reactive materials.
Thermal Ignition and Combustion
- Thermal ignition/explosion phenomena related to unsteady and steady-state heating of energetic materials with reactant consumption and/or non-uniform boundary conditions, theoretical derivation of criticality conditions, and propellant hazards predictions.
- Combustion theory, including ignition exchange criteria for flames on combustible solid surfaces, steady-state laminar flames, and time-dependent flame stability.
Nano-Materials Design and Modeling
- Ab initio and density functional quantum chemical simulations to determine the structural effects of nano-inclusions.
- Time-dependent density functional theory to model interactions between matter and strong laser pulses and to describe confinement-induced optical response shift in quantum wells.
- Semi-classical analyses to probe the cross-over between quantum and classical regimes, with techniques which include Molecular Dynamics (MD) and kinetic Monte Carlo simulations.
Electromagnetic Theory
- Propagation of electromagnetic waves and interactions with atomic and molecular systems.
- Magnetohydrodynamic devices.
- Self-contained portable flux compression generator systems.
- Explosive generator designs with coupled load design for unique electromagnetic and mechanical lethal effects.
- Electrodynamics and plasma chemistry in air and other gases focused on the transport properties of discharges, the power flow in non-thermal plasma (NTP) devices, as well as gas breakdown models.
Explosives, Explosions, and Applications
- Computational fluid dynamics applied to detonation and explosion problems.
- Detonation propagation and failure diameter theory.
- Underwater blast waves and explosion bubble phenomena.
- Properties of aluminized explosives.
- Detonation phenomenology applied to warhead concepts.
- Physical and/or mathematical modeling of initiation/ignition of porous, heterogeneous, energetic materials through interaction of shock waves with materials microstructure to create thermal “hot spots”.
- Phenomenological modeling of growth to detonation in insensitive explosives with large reaction zones.
- Mathematical models for the ignition of hot spots and subsequent hot spot-initiated reaction for shock-to-detonation transition (SOT) in heterogeneous explosives.