1899-1909: THE KEY YEARS OF THE UNDERSTANDING OF SHOCK WAVE AND DETONATION PHYSICS

One century ago, in 1909, finished one of the most creative decade for the progress of shock wave and detonation understanding. In 1899, Chapman provided the basis of what is called now the Chapman-Jouguet theory. During the following years, several authors (Jouguet, Hadamard, Crussard, Duhem, Dixon and the Hungarian Zemplen...) yielded important contributions to the understanding of shock wave and detonation propagation: sonicity properties, possibility of the rarefaction shock, real waves with finite thickness, real geometries and real materials, thermodynamic properties, etc... These years finished in 1909 with Duhem's paper which gathered some properties concerning real materials.