Magnetic gauge instrumentation on the LANL gas-driven two-stage gun

The LANL gas-driven two-stage gun was designed and built to do initiation studies on insensitive high explosives as well as equation of state and reaction experiments on other materials. The preferred method of measuring reaction phenomena involves the use of in-situ magnetic particle velocity gauges. In order to accommodate this type of gauging in the two-stage gun, it has a 50-mm-diameter launch tube. The authors have sued magnetic gauging on the 72-mm bore diameter single-stage gun for over 15 years and it has proven a very effective technique for all types of shock wave experiments, including those on high explosives. This technique has now been installed on the gas-driven two-stage gun. They describe the method used, as well as some of the difficulties that arose during the installation. Several magnetic gauge experiments have been completed on plastic materials. Waveforms obtained in some of the experiments will be discussed. Up to 10 in-situ particle velocity measurements can be made in a single experiment. This new technique is now working quite well, as is evidenced by the data. To their knowledge, this is the first time magnetic gauging has been used on a two-stage gun.