Shock Value

From the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Shooter, comes a riveting narrative of how snipers have changed the course of America's war on al Qaida in the Middle East and Africa. Retired Marine sniper Jack Coughlin (Shooter) and John Bruning pull back the curtain of secrecy to take an insider's look at the dark and misunderstood world of America's sniper force. Long considered the redheaded stepchildren of the infantry, snipers have been loathed by their fellow warriors, called "ten cent killers" by our media, and portrayed as unbalanced psychopaths by Hollywood. Coughlin and Bruning explore the lives and careers of some of America's most effective snipers during key missions, moments and campaigns in the War on Terror. Part page-turning thriller, part deeply human drama, Shock Factor takes you from the streets of the modern day "Stalingrad" of Ramadi to the skyscrapers of Baghdad as America's one-shot warriors fight desperate battles against all odds, find themselves at the heart of tense international incidents, stalk key enemy leaders, and discover horrific human rights abuses perpetrated by our own allies. Based on extensive interviews with snipers currently on active duty, Shock Factor's gripping accounts of harrowing combat, buried truths and secrets revealed could only be told by snipers to a trusted member of their own elite and cloistered brotherhood.

The canonical problems of shock-turbulence interaction and Richtmyer-Meshkov instability (RMI) are central to understanding the hydrodynamic processes involved in Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). Over the last few decades, there has been considerable analytical, computational and experimental work on the planar versions of these problems. In spite of the problem of interest being spherical in nature, there have been few studies in any of the three areas for these problems. It is not clear a priori, that the conclusions drawn from planar versions of these problems carry over to the spherical domain. The research presented here represents a first attempt to understand the hydrodynamic processes involved in an Inertial Fusion Engine (IFE) from capsule implosion to interaction of the resulting shock waves with the chamber gases. To abstract the key hydrodynamic components from the complex physics involved in an IFE, three canonical problems are identified and simulated: Interaction of a blast wave with isotropic turbulence, interaction of a converging shock with isotropic turbulence and RMI in spherical geometry. The last problem is a hydrodynamic abstraction of the capsule implosion itself, while the first two problems attempt to model the late stage interaction of fusion induced shock waves with chamber gases. On the shock-turbulence front, the study primarily focuses on the effect of shock strength relative to background turbulence on vorticity dynamics, which forms the cornerstone of any turbulence simulation. The effect of turbulence on shock structure is also characterized. For the converging shock, the maximum compression achieved in presence of turbulence is compared with that for a pure shock. For spherical RMI, focus is on evolution of the mixing layer and growth in vorticity and turbulent kinetic energy for different incident shock Mach numbers. The effect of interface perturbation on maximum compression achieved, which is one of the most important metrics for feasible ICF, is also considered.

The 26th International Symposium on Shock Waves in Göttingen, Germany was jointly organised by the German Aerospace Centre DLR and the French-German Research Institute of Saint Louis ISL. The year 2007 marked the 50th anniversary of the Symposium, which first took place in 1957 in Boston and has since become an internationally acclaimed series of meetings for the wider Shock Wave Community. The ISSW26 focused on the following areas: Shock Propagation and Reflection, Detonation and Combustion, Hypersonic Flow, Shock Boundary Layer Interaction, Numerical Methods, Medical, Biological and Industrial Applications, Richtmyer Meshkov Instability, Blast Waves, Chemically Reacting Flows, Diagnostics, Facilities, Flow Visualisation, Ignition, Impact and Compaction, Multiphase Flow, Nozzles Flows, Plasmas and Propulsion. The two Volumes contain the papers presented at the symposium and serve as a reference for the participants of the ISSW 26 and individuals interested in these fields.

Understanding the causes and effects of explosions is important to experts in a broad range of disciplines, including the military, industrial and environmental research, aeronautic engineering, and applied mathematics. Offering an introductory review of historic research, Shock Waves and Explosions brings analytic and computational methods

This book illustrates the latest progress on the hydrodynamic instabilities induced by a shock wave, particularly RM (Richtmyer–Meshkov) instability. The hydrodynamic instabilities play crucial roles in various industrial and scientific fields, such as inertial confinement fusion, supersonic combustion, supernova explosion, etc. This book experimentally and theoretically explores the shock-driven instabilities of complex gas-gas and gas-liquid interfaces. The main difficulty in performing an experimental study on RM instability, especially in a shock-tube circumstance, lies in creating an idealized initial interface because the RM instability is extremely sensitive to the initial condition. This book introduces new experimental methods to generate shape-controllable two-dimensional gaseous interfaces, thickness-controllable gas layers, and water droplets embedded with a vapour bubble in the shock-tube experiments. It covers the latest experiments and theories on the shock-driven hydrodynamic instabilities of multi-mode, multi-layer, and multi-phase interfaces. It explores the effects of the mode-competition, interface-coupling, and phase-transition on interface evolution, respectively. This book establishes a universal nonlinear theory to predict the RM instability of a shocked multi-mode interface based on spectrum analysis. This book quantifies the effects of interface-coupling and reverberating waves on the hydrodynamic instabilities of a shocked multi-layer interface. This book provides the experimental studies of the interaction of a shock wave and a multi-phase droplet and proposes a modified Rayleigh-Plesset equation to predict the vapour bubble collapse inside a droplet.