Towards Robust Calibration of the AWSD Reactive Burn Model

Calibration of a reactive burn model for detonation of high explosive is an important step towards predictive hydrodynamic simulations of detonation.A typical calibration consists of varying model parameters (e.g., rate constants, activation energies) until results of hydrodynamic simulations match the experimental data for a certain set of experiments.Hydrodynamic simulations of the dependence of steady detonation velocity on the radius of a cylindrical high-explosive charge -often used in such calibrations -can be computationally expensive.In this work, we propose a method where such expensive simulations are performed infrequently, and only to parameterize and refine a surrogate model for the dependence of the detonation velocity on calibrated parameters.The method is developed, implemented and applied to an example problem -calibration of the AWSD reactive burn model for important high explosive PBX 9502.Two different flavors of the surrogate model are investigated, and the calibration is performed successfully.