Explosive Testing

ARA operates some of the United States’ premier test sites for full-scale explosive testing of building cladding, structural systems, and other protective/hardened designs. Hundreds of window systems and other building components have been explosively tested by ARA for the U.S. Federal Government and commercial manufacturers of blast mitigation products. Since 1993, the ARA team has performed more than 2,000 large-scale explosive tests without an explosive accident. Our explosive operating procedures are approved by the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

ARA explosive testing provides:

• Expertise to design and assemble prototype explosive devices
• Accommodations for explosive charge sizes of up to 20,000 lb TNT equivalent
• Extensive experience in designing and fielding a wide variety of explosive devices and charges
• Precise and safe installations of these charges for reliable and effective results
• Explosive charge diagnostics to verify that charges detonated as intended, which include:
  • Explosive detonation velocity measurements to verify high order detonation of static charges
  • Charge case expansion gage arrays
  • Air blast time-of-arrival gage arrays
• Regular and high speed film documentation as well as motion, force and pressure-impulse instrumentation.

Weapons Effects Testing

ARA has supported over 3000 full- and sub-scale weapons effects tests. Experience includes:

• Construction of detailed, sub-scale test facilities such as a scaled tunnel and a column reaction structure
• Thorough forensic data collection and assessments of the test events
• Development and fielding of new instrumentation such as velocity of detonation cables, RF coils, infrared sensors to better understand the weapon/target interaction
• Correlation of active instrumentation, motion analyses, field surveys, calculations, and other data to obtain a complete understanding of the test event phenomenology