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Compared with deflagration, detonation doesn't need to have an external oxidizer. Oxidizers and fuel mix when deflagration occurs. Detonation is more destructive than deflagrations. In detonation, the flame front travels through the air-fuel faster than sound; while in deflagration, the flame front travels through the air-fuel slower than sound.
As explained above, a deflagration is a subsonic reaction, whereas a detonation is a supersonic (greater than the sound speed of the material) reaction. Distinguishing between a deflagration or a detonation can be difficult to impossible to the casual observer.
In spark-ignition internal combustion engines, knocking (also knock, detonation, spark knock, pinging or pinking) occurs when combustion of some of the air/fuel mixture in the cylinder does not result from propagation of the flame front ignited by the spark plug, but when one or more pockets of air/fuel mixture explode outside the envelope of the normal combustion front.
At the explosion of nuclear bombs lightning discharges sometimes occur. [40] Smoke trails are often seen in photographs of nuclear explosions. These are not from the explosion; they are left by sounding rockets launched just prior to detonation. These trails allow observation of the blast's normally invisible shock wave in the moments following ...
The radioactivity released at Chernobyl tended to be more long-lived than that released by a bomb detonation hence it is not possible to draw a simple comparison between the two events. Also, a dose of radiation spread over many years (as is the case with Chernobyl) is much less harmful than the same dose received over a short period.
David Chapman [3] and Émile Jouguet [4] originally (c. 1900) stated the condition for an infinitesimally thin detonation. A physical interpretation of the condition is usually based on the later modelling (c. 1943) by Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich, [5] John von Neumann, [6] and Werner Döring [7] (the so-called ZND detonation model).
Like light or sound waves, when a blast wave reaches a boundary between two materials, part of it is transmitted, part of it is absorbed, and part of it is reflected. The impedances of the two materials determine how much of each occurs. The equation for a Friedlander waveform describes the pressure of the blast wave as a function of time:
The phenomenon is exploited in pulse detonation engines, because a detonation produces a more efficient combustion of the reactants than a deflagration does, i.e. giving a higher yields. Such engines typically employ a Shchelkin spiral in the combustion chamber to facilitate the deflagration to detonation transition. [2] [3]