How do explosives work ?
Explosives have two types, the highly explosive TNT and the lox explosives like gunpowder. Low explosives are normally a mixture of oxidant that burns at high speed and combustible substances. High explosives came are from chemical compounds, which require detonation to produce supersonic shockwaves at a very fast speed. On the other hand, lox explosives need deflagration to work.
Low explosives work like how we burn coal or wood, with sufficient temperature of the oxidant mixed with combustible substance, rapid gas expansion and heat are produced. The impact of low explosives depends on the amount of oxygen present. Due to oxygen as its medium, the level of oxygen gives the deflagration its violence and speed level.
High explosives are unstable chemical compounds that include some nitrate groups. These chemicals rearrange their molecular structure at great speed when exposed to mechanical shock or sufficient heat, causing the release of energy from reaction product deterioration that results massive explosion.
High explosive’s detonation process has nine main sequences. The first would be the combination of chlorine and metal which in the process, releases excess energy. Other sequence include chlorine and hydrogen combination, oxygen and metal, oxygen and carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, oxygen and carbon monoxide, nitrogen with nitrogen, hydrogen with hydrogen and oxygen with oxygen.
Explosive chains have to be set up due to the extreme amount of heat needed to make the detonation works. In this process, a smaller amount of energy explosive detonates with the use of blaster caps that serve as the basis of another substance’s explosion. To consider a mixture of compound as explosives it must have four qualities. These qualities include gas expansion at great speed, heat generation, the reaction’s speed and the reaction initiation that means controlled detonation. Another desired characteristic of an explosive or a certain use is its capability for controllable toxicity amount.
November 6th, 2011 at 6:09 am
Good day I am so glad I found your blog, I really found you by error, while I was searching on Digg for something else, Regardless I am here now and would just like to say many thanks for a marvelous post and a all round thrilling blog (I also love the theme/design), I don’t have time to read it all at the moment but I have book-marked it and also included your RSS feeds, so when I have time I will be back to read much more, Please do keep up the excellent work.
November 19th, 2011 at 9:43 am
Momentous weblog, keeping me from updated