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4 Things We Can Learn From Explosions
4 Things We Can Learn From Explosions
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0:00
In 2026, the world’s largest academic explosions lab opened in Texas.
0:04
And no, I’m not talking about SpaceX!
0:06
I’m talking about a place where scientists blow things up on purpose.
0:10
Why are we paying scientists to do that, you might ask?
0:13
There’s actually a surprising number
0:15
of good answers to that question.
0:17
It so happens that studying explosions can help us explore the future
0:20
of high-speed travel, the deaths of stars, and cures for diseases.
0:27
[♪INTRO]
0:28
The first reason to master the art of blowing stuff up
0:30
is to learn how to not blow stuff up.
0:33
Stuff like industrial facilities that store a lot of flammable gas.
0:37
One of the worst industrial explosions ever
0:39
happened at the Buncefield oil depot in the U.K.
0:42
In late 2005, a fuel tank overflowed, and the spilled fuel evaporated
0:46
to form a massive cloud of flammable gas around the facility.
0:50
Before long, the inevitable happened: It came in contact with a spark.
0:54
At first the flame burned slowly but soon it was burning faster
0:57
and faster until it exploded in the largest
1:00
blast peacetime Europe has ever seen.
1:03
An explosion happens anytime energy is
1:05
building up too rapidly to disperse smoothly.
1:08
Normally if you’re burning fuel in, say,
1:10
a car engine, the burning is slow and steady.
1:13
As the flame unlocks energy in the fuel, that energy creates
1:17
pressure waves that ripple outward at the speed of sound.
1:20
And as long as the flame isn’t blazing forward faster than that,
1:23
all’s well — the ripples stay ahead of the
1:26
flame and energy dissipates normally.
1:28
This is a kind of combustion reaction called a deflagration.
1:31
But if that fuel starts burning super fast —
1:34
faster than the speed of sound —
1:36
all that unlocked energy piles up and forms a shock wave:
1:40
a big spike in pressure that travels along with the flame front.
1:44
That’s the thing that goes boom. It’s called a detonation.
1:47
This is what happened at Buncefield.
1:49
But why? How did a slow-burning flame
1:52
start moving fast enough to detonate?
1:53
This is the kind of question scientists are interested in
1:56
studying at explosion labs: how ordinary deflagration
1:59
suddenly transitions to a detonation —
2:02
and how they can stop it.
2:03
It’s a surprisingly tricky question, because lots of
2:05
different factors can affect how fast a flame burns.
2:08
At Buncefield, one major factor was trees surrounding the facility.
2:12
As the flame hit them, they created turbulence that wrinkled up
2:16
the flame front and created more surface area,
2:18
which made the flame burn faster and faster.
2:21
So at the new explosion lab in Texas,
2:23
scientists will run experiments to study effects like these.
2:26
The lab is basically a giant tube that gets filled with
2:29
flammable gas and oxygen and then ignited.
2:31
Inside the tube there are different obstacles that create turbulence.
2:35
So scientists can study how different
2:37
types of objects affect the speed of a flame.
2:39
The better they understand that, the better they can control the speed
2:42
of any flame, whether they want to create an explosion or stop one.
2:47
One tool they can use to prevent catastrophes
2:49
like the one at Buncefield is called an arrestor.
2:52
That can be anything that slows down a flame.
2:55
Some arrestors work by absorbing heat, dumping buckets of water,
2:58
or spraying dust to quench a flame.
3:01
Others force gas through narrow metal channels, which forces
3:04
a high-pressure wave to dissipate before it can detonate.
3:07
But perfecting an arrestor depends on understanding exactly
3:11
how flame fronts interact with the things they encounter —
3:14
and scientists are hoping to learn a lot about that here.
3:18
The things scientists learn from those experiments can also
3:21
help them /harness/ the power of controlled detonations…
3:25
for many things, possibly including hypersonic flight.
3:28
Back in the 1940s, years before a plane had ever even
3:31
broken the sound barrier, a German researcher built
3:34
the first engine ever powered by detonations.
3:37
It was a long tube that he filled with a mixture of
3:40
oxygen and hydrocarbon fuel and then ignited.
3:43
At some point along the tube, the flame
3:45
got fast enough to set off a detonation.
3:47
What he built was an early version of what’s
3:49
now called a pulsed detonation engine.
3:52
Pulsed because after each detonation,
3:54
the process has to be repeated:
3:56
The chamber has to be emptied, refilled with fuel, and ignited again.
3:59
That means the engine produces thrust in pulses.
4:02
Pretty cumbersome, but in theory, engines powered by detonation
4:06
can be way more powerful than standard deflagration engines.
4:10
The key is, at the leading edge of the flame, there’s a
4:13
shock wave where pressure spikes almost instantaneously.
4:16
We won’t wade too deep into the thermodynamics of engines today,
4:20
but what you need to understand is this:
4:22
Pressure matters because the amount of work you can
4:25
extract from a gas depends on how much pressure it’s under.
4:28
Just think about letting the air out of a balloon.
4:30
A full balloon will blast itself across the room,
4:33
while a balloon with less air will just kind of flop over.
4:37
The same goes for engines, even though they’re much more complex.
4:40
In a regular jet engine, you don’t get any big
4:42
pressure spikes because energy disperses smoothly.
4:45
But in a detonation engine, the spike from the shock wave lets
4:49
you extract way more energy from the same amount of fuel.
4:52
Literally more bang for your buck…
4:54
So, ever since the mid-20th century, the idea of a
4:57
detonation engine has been super interesting to engineers —
5:00
because it could propel jets or rockets
5:02
multiple times the speed of sound!
5:04
And it’s not entirely theoretical.
5:06
The US Air Force actually built one that flew in 2008.
5:10
Those tubes sticking out the back are part of the engine.
5:13
It maxed out at just around 120 miles per hour,
5:16
but still, it proved that the engine could work.
5:19
Unfortunately, pulsed detonation engines aren’t ideal because
5:22
there’s a pause in thrust every time you empty and refill the engine.
5:27
That’s why scientists came up with a rotating detonation engine.
5:30
In these, fuel travels in a ring around the edge of a cylindrical tube.
5:34
Once you trigger a detonation, the detonation shock wave can
5:38
travel around the ring as long as there’s enough fuel to sustain it.
5:41
Engineers hope to eventually get these out of the lab
5:44
and into rockets or jet engines, but they’re not there yet.
5:47
They need to figure out how to conduct quick,
5:49
precise detonations in order to use them in real jets or rockets.
5:54
And labs like this get them a little closer
5:56
to understanding how to do that.
5:57
When it comes to detonation reactions, energy
5:59
isn’t the only product scientists are interested in.
6:02
Sometimes there are also… diamonds.
6:05
Soviet scientists first discovered this in the 1960s
6:07
at a nuclear weapons lab where they had
6:10
a side hustle making synthetic diamonds.
6:12
One way to do that was by detonating fuel
6:14
to send a shock wave through some graphite.
6:17
Its carbon atoms would rearrange themselves
6:19
under pressure and pop out a diamond.
6:21
But the Soviets realized it should actually be possible to get diamonds
6:24
without graphite too, as long as your fuel has enough carbon in it.
6:28
They put this to the test and found that when a detonation wave
6:31
passes through the fuel, diamonds rain out of it almost instantly.
6:34
And you end up with super tiny, nearly spherical
6:38
crystals called detonation nanodiamonds.
6:40
No one would be getting down on one knee with one of these,
6:42
but it didn’t take long for researchers to realize
6:44
they had something special on their hands.
6:46
Biomedical researchers were especially intrigued.
6:49
They thought these tiny crystals could make excellent
6:51
little vehicles for delivering meds around the body.
6:53
They’re great at carrying cargo, for one, because
6:56
they have a bunch of surfaces you can stick things to.
6:58
Even better: Those surfaces have different charges,
7:01
so they act as magnets for drug molecules.
7:03
Certain proteins can also be chemically bonded
7:05
to their surfaces if the drugs need to be stuck on more tightly.
7:09
Another big perk is the fact that diamonds themselves
7:12
don’t react with the human body, because they’re
7:14
chemically stable, so cells don’t try to kick them out.
7:17
Even cancer cells let them glide right in meaning diamonds can
7:20
act as Trojan horses that deliver their cargo without being detected.
7:25
And they’re small enough to duck right into the cell nucleus —
7:27
which means they can deliver new genetic
7:29
material to cells to treat genetic diseases.
7:31
If scientists could master this technology, it could save countless lives,
7:35
but for the time being, there are still big hurdles.
7:38
One is just figuring out how to get stable, pure, individual crystals.
7:41
The better researchers can understand how they form and what
7:44
causes their imperfections, the closer we’ll be to consistently
7:48
making pure nanodiamonds that we can actually use in medicine.
7:51
The amazing thing is, these explosions that take
7:54
place in a lab look incredibly similar to explosions
7:57
that happen light-years away in certain stars.
8:00
And they give scientists a front-row seat to
8:02
something they’d never be able to see close up.
8:05
I’m talking about supernovas —
8:06
explosions of stars that are so powerful
8:09
a single star can burn as bright as a whole galaxy.
8:12
Scientists have observed tens of thousands of supernovas by now.
8:16
But we still don’t know exactly what causes them.
8:19
The problem is, once you detect a supernova explosion,
8:22
it’s already too late to see what triggered it.
8:24
Most clues have already been blown to smithereens.
8:27
And it’s hard to do a forensic study on the fading
8:29
embers of a blown-up star light-years away.
8:32
Here’s what we do know, though.
8:34
One particular type of supernovas, called type Ias,
8:37
start out as medium-sized stars —
8:39
with less than 10 times the mass of our Sun.
8:42
And then, for some reason, when they reach the end of their lives,
8:45
they tend to explode in an oddly similar way,
8:49
peaking at a similar brightness.
8:51
Astronomers think that Type Ias form from dying stars
8:54
that have burned through all their fuel, leaving behind
8:57
dead cores of carbon and oxygen called white dwarfs.
9:00
As for what happens next, astronomers
9:02
can only make an educated guess.
9:04
The general idea is that, in most cases,
9:06
this white dwarf begins pulling matter off a companion star.
9:10
As it gets more massive, the core gets
9:12
dense enough to kick off nuclear fusion again.
9:15
At first, the leading edge of the burning is moving relatively slowly —
9:19
it’s just regular deflagration at this point.
9:21
But as the star keeps collecting new matter, it eventually gets so
9:24
dense and hot that the rate of fusion goes faster and faster
9:28
until it tips past the speed of sound and becomes a detonation.
9:32
There’s no chemical flame in a supernova like
9:34
there is in a rocket engine or in an explosion lab on Earth,
9:38
but the explosion nevertheless follows the same principles.
9:41
And that means scientists can study the dynamics of
9:43
supernovas right here on Earth by blowing stuff up in labs.
9:47
The main thing they want to understand is how exactly
9:49
deflagration transitions to detonation in a white dwarf.
9:52
For one, we know that detonations on Earth typically happen
9:55
when obstacles create turbulence that speeds up a flame.
9:58
So researchers want to explore how a detonation can
10:01
take place without obstacles — in a smooth ball of gas like a star.
10:06
And what conditions have to exist, in terms of
10:08
temperature, pressure, and chemistry, for it to happen?
10:11
Researchers also want to investigate the hypothesis
10:13
that detonation actually starts in the surface layer of white dwarfs —
10:18
the part of the star made of stolen helium.
10:21
In this scenario, detonation of this layer sends
10:23
a shockwave inward, which then detonates the core.
10:26
In the lab, researchers can layer different kinds of gas, to see if a
10:30
detonation in one really can kick off a detonation in the other.
10:33
These are questions we could likely never study in a star itself.
10:37
And yet, we can start to figure out how these mind-blowing
10:40
explosions play out by using a lab right here on Earth!
10:43
It might seem strange to build a whole facility just to blow things up.
10:47
But sometimes that’s exactly what you need.
10:48
To prevent a catastrophic blast, you have to know how to create one.
10:51
To make a futuristic engine, or a model of a supernova, or a perfect
10:55
vessel for fighting disease, you have to know how to blow things up.
10:58
Sometimes you have to destroy things to make any progress.
11:03
[♪OUTRO]
