Facilities

Test Facilities at LLNL, INL, SNL, LANL: ALERT National Lab collaborators will provide access to preeminent explosives development, characterization, and mitigation test facilities including:

LLNL's High Explosives Application Facility (HEAF) has over 100,000 ft2 of indoor space that includes explosives synthesis labs, eight firing and detonation chambers, shock compression facilities, diagnostics development labs, detonator development lab, energetic materials components development lab, and femtosecond laser machining facility.

INL's Test Range covers over 890 square miles that includes an outdoor explosives test facility (fully instrumented blast range with up to 20,000 lbs TNT equivalent capacity); live fire ranges that accommodate small arms, projectiles, rocket-propelled grenades, and explosively formed penetrator testing; bulk explosives detection facilities with 2,000 lbs TNT equivalent capacity and certified for testing with radioactive sources; and a wireless test bed that can support wide range of electronic countermeasures testing; a Critical Infrastructure Test Range for conducting realistic system-level testing of a wide range of technologies.

SNL's Z facility is a state-of-the-art laboratory used to study dynamic responses of material at the extreme conditions of pressure and temperature that can be found in explosions. The wide range of materials studied in this facility include simple materials like hydrogen, detonation products like carbon, and high explosives like HMX, subjected to both shock and shockless compressions. Isentropic compression experiments on explosives and IEDs will be particularly valuable for understanding the shock sensitivity of explosives and developing a shockless mitigation strategy.

LANL's Explosive and Energetic Materials facilities support research on the initiation of energetic materials through mechanical, thermal, and electromagnetic mechanisms, including HE-driven pulsed-power, non-shock initiation of HE, and special energetic materials; facilities that support the chemical synthesis of new explosives and the preparation of composite energetic materials; capabilities of performing experimental and theoretical investigations of the behavior of a wide variety of materials at high pressures and at time scales ranging from nanoseconds to hours; facilities for characterizing shock properties and the initiation and detonation performance of explosives; facilities for experimentally determining the processes that drive the hydrodynamics of explosives and reacting systems and the development of theoretical models that predict the hydrodynamics of reactive flows; and a pulsed-power test facility employing high pulsed-magnetic fields.

ALERT National Lab collaborators also have extensive relevant expertise: materials science and physics of energetic materials; blast effects modeling (e.g. the LLNL-developed CHEETAH code); armor and blast/frag resistant structures; explosives detection modeling (e.g. the INL-developed SIMION code for modeling MS and IMS); explosives detection methods including Raman, surface-enhanced Raman (SERS), infrared absorption spectroscopies, Raman LIDAR, Stand-off LIBS, UV Raman LIDAR, standard analytical laboratory methods, solid phase microextraction/thermal desorption/MS or electron capture detection, thermo-gravimetric analysis/UV emission, active interrogation (neutron, gamma, X-ray) techniques, IMS, and THz imaging. This expertise will enhance the ALERT research program.

WSU Explosive Characterization and Mitigation Facility: WSU's Institute for Shock Physics (33,000 sq. ft. completed in 2003) houses an impact laboratory (several gas and powder guns to attain impact velocities to 6 km/s), a laser shock wave laboratory, a static pressure laboratory, a compact pulsed power laboratory (to permit ramp wave loading), and a computational facility. State-of-the-art experimental facilities exist to carry out time-resolved continuum measurements, electronic and vibrational spectroscopy measurements, and x-ray diffraction measurements.

TTU Explosives Test Facilities: TTU�s synthesis capabilities include dedicated chemistry labs in both its chemistry and chemical engineering departments, a small scale (up to 500 g) test range on campus, and large scale range up to 250 kg at the Hurricane Test Lab.

RPI Center for Terahertz Research (CTR): The CTR is equipped with the most advanced photonic and opto-electronic instrumentation for generating, measuring and recording picosecond and femtosecond terahertz radiation waves. The CTR is at the forefront of THz technology, one of the most promising research areas for the detection of explosives.

Siemens Corporate Research (SCR)-VistaScape (SiteIQ) and Textron Systems-Common Applications Framework (CAF) Scene Understanding and Multi Sensor Integration Platforms: SiteIQ is a mature commercial system which brings together multi-sensor control, communication, and policy management into a seamless framework. Complementing this is CAF, an interoperability Java-based software tool that enables components of a system of systems to talk to each other and to interact with other internal or external services (e.g., sensors, databases, fusion, etc.). Both SiteIQ and CAF can be incorporated as needed into the ALERT enabling technology testbeds and ultimately the Grand