Hot Spots, High Explosives Ignition, and Material Microstructure

This paper reviews the subject of high explosives ignition with focus on impact and shock loadings from the view point of modeling and identifying scientific issues that need to be addressed to establish a science basis on which to build a better predictive methodology for explosives safety. A motivation is to move explosives safety from empiricism to an advanced computation based analytic scientific and engineering basis, facilitating innovation. But because of the vastness of the subject, the scope of coverage is limited primarily to select aspects of shock and impact loadings that are relevant to the project the author has been involved in and presented in the companion paper by Min Zhou et al. of Georgia Institute of Technology.* (*Min Zhou et al., Materials Science Forum, in this volume)