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Dynamite is an explosive made of nitroglycerin, sorbents (such as powdered shells or clay), and stabilizers. [1] It was invented by the Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel in Geesthacht, Northern Germany, and was patented in 1867. It rapidly gained wide-scale use as a more robust alternative to the traditional black powder explosives. It ...
The term black powder was coined in the late 19th century, primarily in the United States, to distinguish prior gunpowder formulations from the new smokeless powders and semi-smokeless powders. Semi-smokeless powders featured bulk volume properties that approximated black powder, but had significantly reduced amounts of smoke and combustion ...
Contrary to urban legend, an M-80 that contains 3,000 mg of powder is not equivalent to a quarter-stick of dynamite. Dynamite generally contains a stable nitroglycerin-based high explosive, whereas M-80s or any other kind of firecracker contain a low explosive powder, like flash powder or black powder. [10]
This is a compilation of published detonation velocities for various high explosive compounds. Detonation velocity is the speed with which the detonation shock wave travels through the explosive.
On 9 March 1911, the village of Pleasant Prairie and neighbouring town of Bristol, 4 miles (6.4 km) away, were levelled by the explosion of five magazines holding 300 tons of dynamite, 105,000 kegs of black blasting powder, and five rail wagons filled with dynamite housed at a 190-acre (77-hectare) DuPont blasting powder plant. A crater 100 ft ...
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.
For instance, an early 20th-century blasting manual compared the effects of black powder to that of a wedge, and dynamite to that of a hammer. [1] The most commonly used explosives in mining today are ANFO based blends due to lower cost than dynamite.
Finnish smokeless powder. Smokeless powder is a type of propellant used in firearms and artillery that produces less smoke and less fouling when fired compared to black powder. Because of their similar use, both the original black powder formulation and the smokeless propellant which replaced it are commonly described as gunpowder.