Quote:
Originally Posted by mjohnson
Things are trickier in the safety realm - you, with your dynamite and ANFO were working on the "performance" side of things. You'd have been a little salty if all the charge did was spread some fertilizer around so therefore you did everything right to get something reliable.
Mother nature, screwing with us in the safety world, is patient and more than happy to fail until one day she doesn't.
AN classically needs shock, but it can develop its own through a deflagration-to-detonation transition (DDT). Given enough of it, that isn't too hard. Think of something burning/deflagrating - it burns hotter and faster so the pressure goes up, when the pressure goes up it burns hotter and faster. Lather, rinse and repeat.
That's how the detonators on the 75-years-old-in-4-days Nagasaki bomb worked - and how those on many of our SLBMs and ICBMs still work today.
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Yeah, what he said
When I was a little kid, dad would sit me up on the chair in front of a chalkboard he had and he'd teach me things.
One day he was teaching me chem E stuff, covalent bonds, reactions.
I was probably 10 or 11.
He got on a tangent and described the process to manufacture glyceryl trinitrate.
So being a
sooper genius, I took that tiny bit of knowledge to school with me. Now I couldn't actually make the stuff, but I could talk about it and act cool in front of other kids.
A teacher found out and next thing ya know, dad gets a call and had to leave work go to the school.
That was the end of the explosives lessons
He worked at this Hercules powder company plant at the time and knew the guys:
https://www.nytimes.com/1962/08/24/archives/3-killed-as-rocket-fuel-explodes-in-utah-plant.html