Lesson plan
Voitenko compressor
The Voitenko compressor is a shaped charge adapted from its original purpose of piercing thick steel armour to the task of accelerating shock waves. It was proposed by Anatoly Emelyanovich Voitenko (Анатолий Емельянович Войтенко), a Soviet scientist, in 1964. It slightly resembles a wind tunnel. The Voitenko compressor initially separates a test gas from a shaped charge with a malleable steel plate. When the shaped charge detonates, most of its energy is focused on the steel plate, driving it forward and pushing the test gas ahead of it. Ames Research Center translated this idea into a self-destroying shock tube. A shaped charge accelerated the gas in a 3-cm glass-walled tube 2 meters in length. The velocity of the resulting shock wave was a phenomenal . The apparatus exposed to the detonation was, of course, completely destroyed, but not before useful data was extracted. In a typical Voitenko compressor, a shaped charge accelerates hydrogen gas, which in turn accelerates a thin disk up to about 40 km/s. A slight modification to the Voitenko compressor concept is a super-compressed detonation, a device that uses a compressible liquid or solid fuel in the steel compression chamber instead of a traditional gas mixture.…
Article summary
The Voitenko compressor is a shaped charge adapted from its original purpose of piercing thick steel armour to the task of accelerating shock waves. It was proposed by Anatoly Emelyanovich Voitenko (Анатолий Емельянович Войтенко), a Soviet scientist, in 1964. It slightly resembles a wind tunnel. The Voitenko compressor initially separates a test gas from a shaped charge with a malleable steel plate. When the shaped charge detonates, most of its energy is focused on the steel plate, driving it forward and pushing the test gas ahead of it. Ames Research Center translated this idea into a self-destroying shock tube. A shaped charge accelerated the gas in a 3-cm glass-walled tube 2 meters in length. The velocity of the resulting shock wave was a phenomenal . The apparatus exposed to the detonation was, of course, completely destroyed, but not before useful data was extracted. In a typical Voitenko compressor, a shaped charge accelerates hydrogen gas, which in turn accelerates a thin disk up to about 40 km/s. A slight modification to the Voitenko compressor concept is a super-compressed detonation, a device that uses a compressible liquid or solid fuel in the steel compression chamber instead of a traditional gas mixture.…
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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