Accessing the Data | Summary Graphs | Data Sets | References | Database Search

Detonation Database Project - Under Construction!

Introduction  

Welcome to the detonation data base project. The project is a collective effort coordinated by the Explosion Dynamics Laboratory, part of the Graduate Aeronuatical Laboratories at the California Institute of Technology.

The goal of this project is to compile, catalog and present experimental data on gaseous detonations. This data includes cell width, critical tube diameter, initiation energy, minimum tube diameter and DDT limits. The purpose is to facilitate explosion hazards evaluations and comparisons with numerical simulations of detonation behavior.

Data on detonations is widely scattered amoung monographs, journal literature, and institutional reports. Data are often only available graphically and comparisons of different experiments or experiment and simulation requires digitizing graphs to obtain numerical values. The purpose of this archive is to minimize the effort required to locate and obtain numerical data by maintaining this archive.

This project originated 10 years ago with the notion of writing a review article about detonations and chemistry. In the course of writing that article, it became clear that there was a need to have a comprehensive set of references and data library for comparisons with model computations. In the last couple of years, it has become obvious that publishing the data base on the WWW will be much more useful than just having print on paper. So think of this as an electronic appendix to an unpublished article.

Whatever happened to the review article? Eventually, it should also be available on the WWW as an electronic companion to the data. But first we have to finish it!

• Joe Shepherd conceived of the idea.
• Mike Kaneshige has written these web pages and related software and is doing the grunt work.
• Andrzej Teodorczyk created the initial database of publications, digitized the first set of data plots and made the cross comparison plots.
• Jamie Guthrie is completing the data base files.
• We hope that anyone who is involved in detonation research will be willing to be a contributor. For the present, simply contact Joe Shepherd to submit data or obtain information about how to submit data.

While this database is under construction, the accuracy of the data is not guaranteed. We hope to get the database organized, functioning, and useful, and then carefully release more and more data.

The expectation is that the data presented here will be used by other researchers and incorporated into reports and publications. The data presented in this compilation are, properly speaking, the intellectual property of the researchers cited in the associated references. Therefore, when using this data, please be sure to give the appropriate citation.

The data in this online database is also available as a LaTeX  typeset postscript file, available at http://www.galcit.caltech.edu/~mikek/detn_db/html/db.ps (850 kB).

Categories

Units

Abbreviations

To use this online database, choose one of the components below.

There are three main (cross-referenced) databases:

Summary Graphs

Each plot and the associated data files, organized in terms of data category and fuel/oxidizer/diluent.

Data Sets

Each individual data set, with a link to the reference. The tables are not formatted for HTML beauty, but for easy online copying and subsequent plotting, e.g. with gnuplot.

References

The complete information needed to access or cite the sources of data.

Search Engine

You can search the entire database for a string. More control will be added in the near future.