Underlying Physics
When an explosive surrounded by a metallic or other solid shell detonates, the outer shell is accelerated both by the initial detonation shockwave and by the expansion of the detonation gas products contained by the outer shell. Gurney modeled how energy was distributed between the metal shell and the detonation gases, and developed formulas that accurately describe the acceleration results.
Gurney made a simplifying assumption that there would be a linear velocity gradient in the explosive detonation product gases. This has worked well for most configurations, but see the section Anomalous predictions below.
Read more about this topic: Gurney Equations
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