For decades, explosion mechanics was narrowly associated with explosives, shock waves, and defense engineering. Now, as the field enters its seventh decade, its scientific scope has expanded far beyond conventional explosions into new territory. A comprehensive Explosion Mechanics Roadmap, published in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Letters (TAML), brings together 175 researchers from 90 institutions to present a broad view of how matter, materials, and engineering systems behave under extreme dynamic loading. Spanning 65 sections, the roadmap reviews advances and challenges in energetic materials and detonation, shock waves and impact dynamics, damage and protection, and related engineering applications.
At its core, explosion mechanics asks how high-power-density energy is transmitted through shock waves and other intense dynamic processes within extremely short times, triggering high-speed flow, large deformation, and ultimately material failure. This raises a fundamental scientific question: How does a medium respond when energy loading, strain rates, and deformation are pushed to their limits? Answering it requires combining experiment, theory, and computation, from advanced measurements that capture ultrafast events to models and simulations that describe highly nonlinear, multiscale behaviors. The field is moving beyond solving specific engineering problems to become a broader science of matter and engineered systems under extreme dynamic conditions. That makes a field-wide roadmap especially timely, as it can connect advances in experiment, theory, and computation, identify shared scientific challenges, and give researchers a common reference point for the road ahead.
The roadmap also points to a broader shift in how mechanics research is conducted, framing that transition in sweeping historical terms—from Galileo’s experiment-and-mathematics paradigm to AI-empowered scientific research. The authors see this paradigm shift as one of the field’s major challenges. The real question is not whether data-driven methods can replace physical models, but how experimental evidence, mechanics-based understanding, numerical simulation, and AI can work together to improve our understanding and prediction of complex, extreme processes.
The reach of explosion mechanics extends far beyond conventional explosion problems. Insights from shock waves, high-speed impact, and dynamic material failure are increasingly relevant to aerospace engineering, advanced manufacturing, and structural protection. A companion Perspective in TAML brings that broader relevance into focus through resilient infrastructure, showing how knowledge of extreme loading and structural failure can help not only resist severe events but also maintain—and recover—engineering functionality.
Explosion mechanics has a distinctive history in China. Hsue-Shen Tsien (Qian Xuesen) introduced the term “explosion mechanics” in 1963, during the country’s “Two Bombs and One Satellite” program. It grew into an interdisciplinary field spanning fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, physics, and chemistry. Six decades on, its scope has widened from individual explosion events to a broader scientific challenge: understanding and predicting how matter and engineered systems respond under extreme dynamic conditions. One of the biggest challenges will be integrating mechanics-based understanding with emerging AI-enabled methods, especially for strongly nonlinear and multiscale problems. The real opportunity isn’t to replace physical models with data-driven approaches; it’s to bring experiments, simulation, and AI together to sharpen both scientific understanding and predictive power. The new roadmap gives the field a shared reference point for what comes next, bringing together current knowledge, open questions, and emerging research tools in a single field-wide view. The full roadmap is available at 10.1016/j.taml.2026.100714.
