Detonation

[4][5] Detonation was discovered in 1881 by four French scientists Marcellin Berthelot and Paul Marie Eugène Vieille[6] and Ernest-François Mallard and Henry Louis Le Chatelier.

[10] The next advance in understanding detonation was made by John von Neumann[11] and Werner Döring[12] in the early 1940s and Yakov B. Zel'dovich and Aleksandr Solomonovich Kompaneets in the 1960s.

This theory, described by a relatively simple set of algebraic equations, models the detonation as a propagating shock wave accompanied by exothermic heat release.

With a reference frame of a stationary shock, the following flow is subsonic, so that an acoustic reaction zone follows immediately behind the lead front, the Chapman–Jouguet condition.

However, in the 1960s, experiments revealed that gas-phase detonations were most often characterized by unsteady, three-dimensional structures, which can only, in an averaged sense, be predicted by one-dimensional steady theories.

In confinement, the range of composition of mixes of fuel and oxidant and self-decomposing substances with inerts are slightly below the flammability limits and, for spherically expanding fronts, well below them.

When used in explosive devices, the main cause of damage from a detonation is the supersonic blast front (a powerful shock wave) in the surrounding area.

However, detonation waves may also be used for less destructive purposes, including deposition of coatings to a surface[25] or cleaning of equipment (e.g. slag removal[26]) and even explosively welding together metals that would otherwise fail to fuse.

[27] The first flight of an aircraft powered by a pulse detonation engine took place at the Mojave Air & Space Port on January 31, 2008.