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Primary injuries are caused by blast overpressure waves, or shock waves. Total body disruption is the most severe and invariably fatal primary injury. [2] Primary injuries are especially likely when a person is close to an exploding munition, such as a land mine. [3]
In general, surrounding a bomb with denser media, such as water, absorbs more energy and creates more powerful shock waves while at the same time limiting the area of its effect. When a nuclear weapon is surrounded only by air, lethal blast and thermal effects proportionally scale much more rapidly than lethal radiation effects as explosive ...
A shock wave compression results in a loss of total pressure, meaning that it is a less efficient method of compressing gases for some purposes, for instance in the intake of a scramjet. The appearance of pressure-drag on supersonic aircraft is mostly due to the effect of shock compression on the flow.
Overpressure (or blast overpressure) is the pressure caused by a shock wave over and above normal atmospheric pressure. The shock wave may be caused by sonic boom or by explosion, and the resulting overpressure receives particular attention when measuring the effects of nuclear weapons or thermobaric bombs.
Hydrostatic shock, also known as hydro-shock, is the controversial concept that a penetrating projectile (such as a bullet) can produce a pressure wave that causes "remote neural damage", "subtle damage in neural tissues" and "rapid effects" in living targets.
The medical effects of the atomic bomb upon humans can be put into the four categories below, with the effects of larger thermonuclear weapons producing blast and thermal effects so large that there would be a negligible number of survivors close enough to the center of the blast who would experience prompt/acute radiation effects, which were observed after the 16 kiloton yield Hiroshima bomb ...
Blast waves cause damage by a combination of the significant compression of the air in front of the wave (forming a shock front) and the subsequent wind that follows. [15] A blast wave travels faster than the speed of sound, and the passage of the shock wave usually lasts only a few milliseconds. Like other types of explosions, a blast wave can ...
After a brief period, this shock front reaches and then passes the initial radiative fireball. The shock wave contains so much energy that the compression heating created in the air causes it to glow. At the point in the explosion captured in the adjacent photo, the shock front has passed the original radiative fireball and has about twice its ...