Formation and Penetration of High‐Speed Collapse Jets

The explosively driven oblique collapse of two metal plates has been studied numerically in order to deduce the interaction region structural details. Emphasis was placed upon circumstances leading to high‐speed jet formation. It is shown that many of the features of metallic jets can be estimated easily from readily accessible data on metal properties. The inclusion of viscosity has only a small effect for stress coefficients of reasonable magnitude, but is sufficient to explain the discrepancy between experiments and simple theory near the critical angle for jet formation. The penetration of a metallic jet was also calculated in order to show the detailed interaction with a target. The calculations were performed on high‐speed computer with the Particle‐in‐Cell method.