a match can cause a small explosion, so does santex, tnt, c4 etc etc...

is there any units to measure how powerful this explosions are?

Power (energy released by the reaction per unit time) would probably be the best 'metric' for this.

Of course they also have the metric of kilotons of TNT (20 kilotons was the approximate payload of the Hiroshima bomb IIRC) and yes they also use the Hiroshima bomb as a metric (e.g. measuring North Korea's nuke), but they aren't really the best metrics in the world to use because it measures only the total released energy, which is nice to know, but doesn't tell you the rate at all. [e.g. 20 kilotons in a few seconds or less would be a big big explosion, but 20 kilotons over 5 decades is pretty negligible]

Edit: Oh, and it probably has to be normalised per unit volume too, if it's spread out too thinly it also is quite meaningless again

My final answer would probably power normalised by volume.

Edit 2: I also note that you seem to be referring a little to the yield of the substance (evidenced by the different materials you've talked about)

This post has been edited by bgeh: Jun 14 2009, 10:10 AM

Yes, that's why bombs are measure in kg. Because how much mass to produce this much of energy. Nevertheless, explosion is by all means a rapid release of energy.

Just like i put Lithium into water. Lithium reacts with water to form Lithium Hydroxide. Bond forming between OH and Li releases huge amount of energy in a very short time.

anyone tried measuring the explosion of the mentos thingie?

Mentos???


And with the formation of Hydrogen, else there wouldn't be an explosion. Just tons of heat released

This post has been edited by NicJolin: Jun 20 2009, 01:18 PM

I think it was tested by mythbuster..

shake the bottle full of coke, then u throw some mentos in it... then u'll see some form of explosion.... this shows that size doesnt really matters right?

Fission-Fusion bombs are actually the one which truely shows that size does not matter.

This is my favourite explosion of all time



This post has been edited by befitozi: Jun 20 2009, 01:42 PM

is this an atom bomb ?

No that's not explosion at all! Not even near. Explosion is usually cause by chemical reaction. The mentos and coke however, is completely non-chemical at all. In fact, it is a physical process where the mentos provides the carbonated liquid so much nucleation sites that results all the dissolved carbon dioxide to burst out in an instant! Which confuse so much people and make them think it is some kind of chemical explosion.

Drinking coke + mentos won't burst ur gut, it'll make u burp alot and gives you an unwell stomach, that's all.

hydrogen bomb.

but it has impact... i remember the coke bottle burst open and the pieces flew quite far away... don;t u think it possess similar traits with explosion?

whoa... cool..

Most probably due to the build up pressure in the container. It might looks like an explosion, but you can't possibly classify it that way.

Hydrogen bomb which was dropped by the russians, the core heat was like 300 million celcius which is 20x hotter than the core of the sun. Wonder if they have behemoth's kodiak bears over there like the 5ft spawned cat fish over at chernobyl