ABSTRACT
Explosive effects are an important consideration when dealing with projectiles that are designed to deliver blast, fragments, or even deep penetrating effects such as a shaped charge jet. The earlier sections on penetration focused on the penetration events that occurred when a relatively solid projectile impacted the target. This impact resulted in either a non-penetration=partial penetration or a perforation. The latter effect was the sole cause of damage considered. Before the advent of the KE long-rod, even armor-piercing projectiles carried some explosive that would burst the projectile (hopefully) after passage through the armor of the target. This further damage mechanism would use fragmentation to destroy the soft targets protected by the armor. Some projectiles are designed as strictly HE carriers. While these projectiles may have
some armor-penetration capability, their primary job is to kill soft targets. A soft target is one that does not require a large amount of KE to kill or one that requires a large number of small perforations to destroy. Classically, soft targets are personnel, trucks, aircraft, radars, etc. While a single, well-placed KE projectile would kill these targets, their vulnerable areas are small; so to increase the probability of kill, a large number of slower moving or lower mass fragments are required. A further adaptation of focused explosive energy is the shaped charge which will be the
subject of Chapter 18. These devices can penetrate deep into armor and do not require any delivery KE to be effective. The explosive effects we shall discuss here will be used in Chapter 18 but further adapted for shaped charge jet analysis. In this chapter, we shall first discuss how an explosive wave propagates to generate
velocity in the metal casing that it is adjacent to. This will allow us to calculate the velocity and direction of fragment flight. After this, we shall discuss the penetration mechanisms (very similar to ogival-nosed projectiles and KE long-rods) of fragments.
