how does the Monroe/Neumann effect work?
In: Physics
It’s the principle behind HEAT (high explosive anti-tank) rounds.
If you take a flat pancake of plastic explosive, put it on an armor plate and detonate it, the shock wave “slaps” the armor and hardly anything happens. (You might get spalling off the inside, like HESH rounds do. But it’s a really poor way to breach plating.)
But they found that if you take your pancake of explosive, and dig a cone-shaped pit in it before you put it on the armor, the shock wave begins at the point of that cone, and gets a “running start” before hitting the plate. The shock hits the plate much harder, directly under where that cone was dug out. Often the plate ends up with a cone-shaped crater in it, roughly the shape and size of the cone in the explosive.
Modern HEAT rounds contain a mass of plastic explosive, with a cone dug out of it, and then they put some kind of metal liner inside that dug-out cone. When the explosive detonates, the shock is strong enough to accelerate the metal forward in a cone-shaped jet that can do nasty things to armor plate.
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