Experimental study of the shock-wave processes in solid and liquid paraffins

The structure of the compression pulse in and the spall strength of paraffin and docosane are experimentally studied. It is found that the strength of paraffin decreases by a factor of 1.5 when the melting temperature is passed (from 20 to 14 MPa), and the strength of docosane remains almost unchanged (about 24 MPa). Docosane in the solid state is shown to exhibit elastoplastic properties and to have anomalous compressibility at a pressure below 100 MPa. The possibility of application of a homogeneous nucleation model to interpreting the obtained data is discussed.