Explosives are highly energetic substances with fast reaction rates and can be in gaseous, liquid, or solid form. Chemical reactions can propagate through the explosive at high supersonic speeds as a detonation wave: a compression shock with an abrupt increase in the thermodynamic state, initiating chemical reactions that turn the reactants into products. This book is devoted to a description of the detonation phenomenon, explaining the physical and chemical processes responsible for the self-sustained propagation of the detonation wave, the hydrodynamic theory that permits the detonation state to be determined, the influence of boundary conditions on the propagation of the detonation, and how detonations are initiated in the explosive.

The book is concerned only with detonation waves in gaseous explosives, because they aremuch better understood than detonations in condensed phasemedia. There are many similarities between detonations in gaseous and in condensed explosives, in that the detonation pressure of condensed explosives is much higher than the material strength of condensed explosives and the hydrodynamic theory of gaseous detonations is applicable also to condensed phase detonations. However, material properties such as heterogeneity, porosity, and crystalline structure can play important roles in the initiation (and hence sensitivity) of condensed explosives.

It is perhaps impossible to be entirely objective in writing a book, even a scientific one. The choice of the topics, the order of their presentation, and the emphasis placed on each topic, as well as the interpretation of theoretical and experimental observations, are bound to reflect the author's views.