Related Experiment Video
Updated: Feb 28, 2026

Blast Quantification Using Hopkinson Pressure Bars
Published on: July 5, 2016
Explosion yield estimation from pressure wave template matching
Stephen Arrowsmith1, Daniel Bowman1
1Sandia National Laboratories, P. O. Box 5800, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87185, USA sjarrow@sandia.gov, dbowma@sandia.gov.
Abstract:
A method for estimating the yield of explosions from shock-wave and acoustic-wave measurements is presented. The method exploits full waveforms by comparing pressure measurements against an empirical stack of prior observations using scaling laws. The approach can be applied to measurements across a wide-range of source-to-receiver distances. The method is applied to data from two explosion experiments in different regions, leading to mean relative errors in yield estimates of 0.13 using prior data from the same region, and 0.2 when applied to a new region.
Related Concept Videos
Sound as Pressure Waves
The pressure fluctuation depends on the difference in displacements between the successive points in the...
Intensity and Pressure of Sound Waves
Unlike the time average of a sinusoidal term, which is zero since it is positive...
Shock Waves
When the source's speed approaches the speed of sound, constructive interference between successive wavefronts emitted by the source occurs immediately behind it. Initially, scientists believed that this constructive interference would result in such high...

