Scaling Laws for the Peak Overpressure of a Cannon Blast

For large cannons, blast overpressure can have a detrimental effect on the crew in the near field (i.e., within a distance of 50 tube diameters or calibers from the muzzle center) as well as on the support personnel and equipment in the far field (i.e., at a distance greater than 50 calibers). Therefore, an efficient method to determine the peak overpressure due to a cannon blast is highly desired. In this study, we investigate scaling laws for the peak overpressure, due to the primary blast of a large cannon, with the aim that they can be applied as an efficient method to evaluate the peak overpressure in the far field. We explore two types of scaling laws; each type is based on a power-law model involving a prefactor and an exponent as model parameters. The two types of the power-law models differ in the way they incorporate the polar angle dependence. The first type was proposed by Fansler and Schmidt (1983, “The Prediction of Gun Muzzle Blast Properties Utilizing Scaling,” U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, Report No. ARBRL-TR-02504). They developed a muzzle-center based scaling law (MCSL) in which the polar angle dependence was incorporated through a reference length scale to define a nondimensional or scaled radial distance from the muzzle center and the model parameters were independent of the polar angle. They calibrated the parameters by employing least-squares fit to a wide range of experimental data. In this study, we recalibrated or updated the parameters for the current cannon by using the numerical simulation data for the cannon blast in the near field. Additionally, we developed a second type of scaling law in which the radial distance is defined from the blast center (in contrast to the muzzle center) and scaled using the inner tube diameter. In this model, the angular dependence is incorporated directly into the model parameters. For this model too, we calibrated the parameters by using the numerical simulation data. We observe that both the modified version of the muzzle-center based scaling law as well as the blast-center based scaling law (BCSL) show a significantly closer fit to the numerical and experimental data and achieve a similar level of accuracy. This indicates that the current form or structure of the two types of power-law based scaling models is able to fit well with the near-field data; however, the current methodology requires a calibration process for a given cannon of interest. In the future, with far field data, we plan to evaluate predictions in the far field.