Revisiting Shock Initiation Modeling of Homogeneous Explosives

Abstract Shock initiation of homogeneous explosives has been a subject of research since the 1960s, with neat and sensitized nitromethane as the main materials for experiments. A shock initiation model of homogeneous explosives was established in the early 1960s. It involves a thermal explosion event at the shock entrance boundary, which develops into a superdetonation that overtakes the initial shock. In recent years, Sheffield and his group, using accurate experimental tools, were able to observe details of buildup of the superdetonation. There are many papers on modeling shock initiation of heterogeneous explosives, but there are only a few papers on modeling shock initiation of homogeneous explosives. In this article, bulk reaction reactive flow equations are used to model homogeneous shock initiation in an attempt to reproduce experimental data of Sheffield and his group. It was possible to reproduce the main features of the shock initiation process, including thermal explosion, superdetonation, input shock overtake, overdriven detonation after overtake, and the beginning of decay toward Chapman-Jouget (CJ) detonation. The time to overtake (TTO) as function of input pressure was also calculated and compared to the experimental TTO. Keywords: detonationinitiationnitromethanereactive flow