It was proposed during World War II independently by Yakov Zeldovich,[1] John von Neumann,[2] and Werner Döring,[3] hence the name.
This model admits finite-rate chemical reactions and thus the process of detonation consists of the following stages.
First, an infinitesimally thin shock wave compresses the explosive to a high pressure called the von Neumann spike.
The spike marks the onset of the zone of exothermic chemical reaction, which finishes at 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.