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Log–log plot comparing the yield (in kilotonnes) and mass (in kilograms) of various nuclear weapons developed by the United States.. The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is the amount of energy released such as blast, thermal, and nuclear radiation, when that particular nuclear weapon is detonated, usually expressed as a TNT equivalent (the standardized equivalent mass of trinitrotoluene ...
In fluid dynamics, a blast wave is the increased pressure and flow resulting from the deposition of a large amount of energy in a small, very localised volume. The flow field can be approximated as a lead shock wave, followed by a similar subsonic flow field. In simpler terms, a blast wave is an area of pressure expanding supersonically outward ...
For air bursts at or near sea level, 50–60% of the explosion's energy goes into the blast wave, depending on the size and the yield of the bomb. As a general rule, the blast fraction is higher for low yield weapons. Furthermore, it decreases at high altitudes because there is less air mass to absorb radiation energy and convert it into a blast.
The piezoelectric blast gauges were thrown off scale and no records were obtained. The excess-velocity blast-yield measurement (precise measurement of the velocity of sound at the site of the explosion and then comparing it with the velocity of the blast wave) [127] provided among the most accurate measurements of the blast pressure. Another ...
Nuclear weapon design. The first nuclear explosive devices provided the basic building blocks of future weapons. Pictured is the Gadget device being prepared for the Trinity nuclear test. Nuclear weapon designs are physical, chemical, and engineering arrangements that cause the physics package [1] of a nuclear weapon to detonate.
TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion.The ton of TNT is a unit of energy defined by convention to be 4.184 gigajoules (1 gigacalorie), [1] which is the approximate energy released in the detonation of a metric ton (1,000 kilograms) of TNT.
A nuclear explosion is an explosion that occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from a high-speed nuclear reaction.The driving reaction may be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion or a multi-stage cascading combination of the two, though to date all fusion-based weapons have used a fission device to initiate fusion, and a pure fusion weapon remains a hypothetical device.
Overpressure. 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.