Comments on “The chemistry of detonations”

The relation between the interesting papers of Kamlet and coworkers on the detonation properties and adiabatic exponent (gamma) of the detonation products of condensed explosives and some earlier related work by the writer and Parlin is discussed. A new and significantly improved method of estimating gamma is presented. The correlations show that although gamma depends largely on the charge density of explosives (as postulated before), it also depends on certain properties of explosive composition. Composition has little effect on the gamma of most ordinary explosives because the values of their composition parameters do not differ appreciably. On the other hand, the composition effect on gamma can become quite significant (or dominant) for special compositions, for which conventional computational methods (including the Kamlet equation) generally have difficulties in accurately predicting the detonation properties.