Portable Data Recorder for Measuring Sand Grain Fracture After Blasts

Abullet cannot penetrate through a sandbag while an arrow can, so understanding the behavior of granular materials such as sand and its energy absorption in a blast is critical in the design of armor. To this end, as part of the “Soil Blast Modeling and Simulations” project sponsored by the Office of Naval Research’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI), experiments were performed using a portable data recorder to determine the mechanical behavior of sand grains under confined compression.