Photo Credit: Texas A&M RELLIS Campus
A new Detonation Research Test Facility will be built and opened next year on the RELLIS Campus, adding to its array of capabilities for solving complex global problems.
The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents approved a plan to invest $5 million for construction of what is likely to be the largest university-based facility of its kind in the world. Dr. Elaine Oran, a world authority on the physics and chemistry of explosions, will lead a team at the DRTF to examine how flammable gases and other materials interact and sometimes detonate on a massive scale.
Discoveries at the facility could help prevent mining, industrial, and home accidents, predict the path of wildfires, make high-speed engines run more efficiently, and improve the understanding of supernovas.
Funding for the facility is split evenly between the Governor’s University Research Initiative, started by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2015, and the Chancellor’s Research Initiative, started by Chancellor John Sharp in 2013.
“This investment is bound to lead to remarkable breakthroughs,” Sharp says. “We’ll make Texas oil, gas, and chemical industries, and the entire world safer from accidental explosions.”
Both research initiatives are designed to attract more top faculty to Texas, and both played a role in the 2019 hiring of Oran.
Oran is an aerospace engineering professor and the O’Donnell Foundation Chair VI in the Texas A&M College of Engineering. She came from the University of Maryland and previously served as the Senior Scientist for Reactive Flow Physics at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. There, she led a research team that used a smaller-scale detonation facility in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania to measure how gases, liquids, and solids interact and sometimes cause explosions. Researchers call these issues “reactive flow problems.”
Oran pioneered computational technology to address reactive flow problems, unifying concepts in chemistry, physics, engineering, and computer science in a new methodology.
“We’re looking at explosions: the physics that cause accidental explosions and how to stop them; or in the case of high-speed engines, how to promote them quickly and control them,” Oran says. “It’s all about safety, control, and advancing knowledge.”
She says she was attracted to Texas and Texas A&M by the willingness to invest in a detonation facility that could make the step to the next level of discovery and information.
“It was just an amazing opportunity,” Oran says. “It’s the kind of thing you really couldn’t say no to.”
The centerpiece of the facility is a 2-meter diameter, 200-meter long detonation tube made of steel walls at least 3/4-inch thick. It will sit on concrete supports 2 feet above ground in a secure, isolated, and open area near the campus’s runways.
The DRTF will have a protective earth berm between the steel detonation tube and a control building for researchers. At the opposite end, a concrete wall and berms will surround a muffler pipe to keep the noise down.
The facility will be near two other testing ranges being assembled for the George H.W. Bush Combat Development Complex — in partnership with Army Futures Command — to advance warfare-related technology. While the detonation facility is not part of the BCDC, discoveries there could have applications for the Department of Defense.
One BCDC range is an enclosed, highly instrumented tube for testing lasers and other materials traveling at hypersonic speeds. The other is an outdoor range for experimenting with high-tech combat vehicles and their communication systems.
The DRTF will be operated by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station as well. It will join a wide array of new, cutting-edge facilities at the RELLIS Campus on the western edge of Bryan, including the BCDC, the Center for Infrastructure Renewal, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, and the SecureAmerica Institute.
Detonation-related discoveries could advance the work of the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center, which is operated by the TEES to promote safety in chemical processes in the oil, gas, and pharmaceutical industries.
The safety center was established in memory of an employee killed in a 1989 explosion at the Phillips Petroleum Complex in Pasadena. The initial blast registered 3.5 on the Richter scale and an ensuing fire took 10 hours to control. In all, 23 employees died and 314 were injured.
View additional photos at tamus.edu/regents-ok-building-detonation-testing-facility-at-rellis.
Courtesy of The Texas A&M University System
