By doing the explosion under the water, you were so close to something I did at the research institute where I worked a decade ago. When the parameters are right and your bucket is not ejected to orbit, you can make sol out of any metal. Basically, nanoparticles, suspended in the water. If you play around with the energy, you can somewhat control the particle size and change the colour of the solution. Cool stuff!
Heh, why is it always explosions that make metal nanoparticles... one of the ways to get gold nanoparticles is to make it into explosive gold and then just blow it. Also works with acetylides like copper acetylide.
Regarding the bucket shooting up, I remember seeing someone explain this before. The shockwave through the water travels downward, reflects off the bottom of the bucket (which can't move further downward due to the ground), then back up through the water. The water moves upward so quickly that there's not enough time for air to mix with it, causing a vacuum to form between the bottom of the bucket and the body of water, lifting the bucket upward. EDIT: Folks, please stop saying water is incompressible in the replies. That's a gross simplification of water's material properties - water *is* compressible, it just has a fairly significant bulk modulus and a positive coefficient of its bulk modulus with pressure, which is why it often appears incompressible - but that's ultimately irrelevant because transfer of momentum doesn't require a pressure differential in the first place.
I don't think you even have to reference a vacuum forming, as a similar thing can happen when you hit any object from the top. If the elasticites work well together, the object will bounce off of the surface. (though ofc the water pulling on the container by the vacuum and also probably just friction helps, too)
Basically yeah The buckets walls expand out a bit from the pressure, then as it lurches back into shape it ejects the water up, the combination of it being shoved down from that makes it then springboard off the ground, surprisingly the more solid and inflexible a surface you use for this the more it bounces The atomic trampoline videos from nilered kinda explain why
approved comment : u said u dont understand why the bucket goes up instead of down... with the VAB music .. u know it i bet it.. presure inside water does push also at the botom , botom of bucket expande , ground push against bucket .. resulting force is upward ..
@@PyroteknikidThere are still some important details missing from Wikipedia, but more than was used here. Still some missing from Carey Sublette’s “Nuclear Weapons FAQ” Website but more than Wikipedia.
This is so great, it annoys me so much that no one with a high end high speed camera has documented electrical phenomena like this. The detail would be so amazing.
*EXACT-A-MUNDO* *yet it's the best way to learn cause something sticks forever* *edit: that algebraic equation reminds me of Foghorn Leghorn with Egghead Jr scenes*
@@simon-pierrelussier2775 Neatly arranged and oftentimes microscopic runes made out of different minerals, transmitting energy in the form of particles that are and aren't, with electromagnetism being a force that we understand enough to use, and can explain with very intricate scientific theories... but at the end of the day we have no concrete explanation of why these fundamental forces exist
You _absolutely_ need to make coils of thick wire, send the pulse through that, and put a coin in the middle of the coil so the lorentz forces crush the coin in on itself :D You can start smaller and wrap wire around a soda can and watch it shear itself in half
What killed your SCR was probably exceeding its current rate-of-rise limit. When the SCR is triggered it takes a finite amount of time for the conduction to spread over the full area of the semiconductor disc. So having not enough inductance in the circuit causes the current to rise faster than the conduction area is able to spread over the disc, which kills the SCR via local overheating of the semiconductor disc around the gate connection.
That's exactly why I was thinking. A long time ago, I build a fuse testing device with a capacitor bank at 250V, around 500J, and to prevent this, I included an air-cored inductor just big enough to control the dI/dt to within the acceptable limit. For many applications, an exploding bridgewire device only needs to work once. Otherwise, I wouldn't know how to fix this, other than using a thyratron, or maybe a triggered spark gap.
You should be able to increase the gate conductance area via increase gate current, I think over limiting of the gate inrush current caused the failure.
The maximum current rise rate might only be used if the gate trigger current is correct, it needs a very fast rise, high enough peak current and some hold time.
@zyeborm yeah I have worked on several pulsed power designs for particle accelerators and typically thyratron tubes are still more capable than the best semiconductor devices and for really high power the simple spark gap is still the regarding power handling capability
At the chair where I completed my bachelor's, I had the opportunity to build a coin shrinker. It operated at 10kV and 500µF, packing quite a punch. My professor's doctoral advisor had such a device and wanted a replica for his chair. It was a great experience, especially for learning about safety aspects. I can confirm that such blasts, with several kilojoules of energy, are mighty indeed. Hearing protection cannot be understated. In the first experiments, our primary blast shield was shredded. We underestimated the force quite a bit. And that was only at 7kV. Since then, we have agreed to only go to 5 or 6kV during the testing phase. Afterwards, we installed a secondary blast shield and fortified the primary with metal. In a subsequent test, it cracked but held together. Your build has great quality and even incorporates some aspects I would have liked to include in ours. However, we had to make compromises at several points because everything had to be designed for 10kV. It is similar in that the entire coil gets vaporized, but effectively, our goal was not to create an explosion, but to shrink coins. We have to operate the primary switch from a distance of around 5 meters because it’s just too dangerous otherwise. A lever, like the one in your video, is not feasible. We use gravity-driven brass contacts that are activated with a thread. I am actually considering doing my master's on this topic. The fact that plasma physics is involved is a great motivation. Still, I am searching for other opportunities that might also be interesting.
Someone in my family used a similar setup with a coil made out of copper flat rod and titanium membranes for physiology experiments. Turns out shockwaves can activate the heart’s conduction system in an etherized rabbit. The switch was a self-quenching arc switch that used HV trigger to start ionization in the gap, and then the design of the insulator around the gap used aerodynamics to blow the arc out. The whole thing was built in a tall 18” rack. Capacitors were HV oil types. Oh, it could do 1kJ discharges at 10Hz rate :) Even had a TTL trigger input.
As an aside: 4.184kj, while officially being 1 gram of tnt equivalent (as in the unit), 1 gram of tnt releases a bit less (closer to 4kj). The reason 4.184kj was chosen is because that is EXACTLY 1 calorie. So. 1 tera calorie is equal to 1 megaton of TNT.
This was a treat. I made a similar device many years ago in college using a 400uF 5kV energy storage capacitor. Sacrificial knife switches and a long stick ended up being the easiest way to trigger. I can relate to feeling the concussion of the pressure wave hitting your chest. Every once in a while I think about making another one, but at the time I didn't realize just how dangerous they could be and now I'm a bit terrified of them.
Regarding bleeding resistors, something that didn't hear mentioned here, is, they are not just in case you leave the capacitor bank alone. They are extremely important due to the memory effect, which slowly recharges the cap bank to a certain voltage. I'm not 100% sure, but at 18:22 there could be an example of it
Ive had my pulse cap dump to zero and rapidly gain 1KV back into it shortly after since its an 11KV cap and as you said, memory. Thankfully you can get ceramic disk resistors that can dump 100+KJ in seconds, useful for emergency..safe dumps!
Regarding the flyback diodes blowing up: Even diodes from the same batch will have different reverse leakage currents, so when put in series, one will typically see a larger voltage drop, leading to rapid deconstruction. To ensure that the voltage is evenly split across the two diodes, you can add some high value resistors in parallel. Current through the resistors should be around an order of magnitude higher than the reverse leakage currents. You can also add some small parallel capacitors to help compensate for different reverse recover times. Great project!
Another idea I had was DIY high voltage capacitors made with aluminum foil and ~150 micron thick glass microscope slide covers as the dielectric layer. Not ideal, but the breakdown voltage is high enough that you can stack them in series a meter long, pot it, and charge it up to megavolts (albeit at nF capacitance) with very low ESR/ESL. Could make for some interesting content at low cost.
@@flavortown3781 Yes, I think so. A much thinner version of them is used for DIY air (nitrogen) pulse lasers, many videos of those on youtube, but using plastic wrap instead of microscope slides as the dielectric between aluminum foil conductive layers.
As for why your flyback protection diodes blew up once you replaced the SCR with a mechanical switch, I think you accidentally constructed a crude boost converter. With an SCR the latching effect ensures that the trigger pulse causes continuous conduction in the switched path. However, the mechanical switch comes with a bouncing effect where slamming down that block of copper causes a rapid mechanical oscillation of connection and disconnection. This causes a large dI/dt which leads to a proportionally large voltage delta across the path inductance. The combination of the increased voltage across the diodes and repeatedly moving them in and out of conduction (probably violating their recovery time) would be sufficient to burn them up. (On top of this, the two in series probably didn't help - this is probably a good use case for a gas discharge tube as part of the snubber network)
Guarantee there were some massive circulating currents from that rough block literally bouncing. He should have invested in laying down some 55% silver braze and polishing the surface to within a few tens of microns for a more resilient and mechanically less bouncy contact surface.
@@sivalley Mechanical switches always bounce even if they're just big blocks of copper. You'd need some kind of a really hard spring system to slam the copper together to minimize the bouncing time but they'd still bounce a few times unless the copper is literally smushed from the impact of the switch closing.
@wombatillo more what I'm getting at is that copper oxides are not conductive but silver oxides are so there is less of a chance that one of those bounces will be a high impedance connection contributing to the back emf spikes
My only doubt with this theory is that switch bounce shouldn't be able to break the circuit. At these currents, the voltage across an arc is in the range of 10-100 volts per centimeter, plus an extra 20 or 30V at the interface with the electrodes. It would be interesting to use a gas discharge tube across the diode though, it definitely could confirm if this is what was happening.
Excellent video, I hope it goes viral for you, it has all the right ingredients. I am an electrical engineer and I have to say your explanations are great, you would make a good educator. I must say, I never even thought about exploding wire and just assumed chemical detonators were used in the 1940s. I mean wire strain gauges were just being invented near the end of the war. Those old physicists,engineers, and mechanics were very brilliant.
To be completely honest I had quite low expectations when I saw the title… but boy, was I wrong. After finishing the video this must be one of the more visually spectacular footage in your channel (and even on TH-cam as a whole). Both the impressions and the slow motion look gorgeous. Keep up the great work! Also, nice management of the ads. This is one of the few channels in which that content is decenly fun and worth watching.
Slowmo Guys collab would be good for some of these. The difference in speed between the wire exploding and then things like the bucket launching would give some nice content
A very good video. When I was kid I happened upon an old issue of Scientific American Amateur scientist where a exploding wire was used as a light source for high speed photography. I was amused to see a mouse trap used as a high voltage high speed switch to connect the capacitors to the wire. This worked rather well for such a primitive method. I was able to build a very dangerous 10 KV 4 uf of oil filled caps 200 joule rig. I have no idea how fast it was since I did not have or could afford a scope back then.
Reminds me of a fun time when I wanted to discharge huge standalone flashlamp capacitor but could not be arsed to look for screwdriver so I simply used thin tin/lead soldering wire with rosin core. Not sure if I ever regained full hearing.
Being an HVAC tech that used to operate naval nuclear reactors has caused me to fuse subject matter in ways that should not exist. Doesn't help that some buddies and I built a coil gun with disposable camera flash units and got yelled at by the school CO at Power School. He did have us demo it before confiscating and destroying it, thankfully the base CO did not get involved. We had done all the math by hand for how many turns of what size wire and how far apart to space the three stages on a Bic Cristal pen to fire .177 steel BBs.
This is awesome! I was looking into a way to make small explosions that could be repeated several times with similar characteristics for audio measurements - impulse response, basically. Thanks!
In the late 1960s I was a young airman electrician assigned to Hanscom Field AFB in Massachusetts. There was Ratheon , Lincoln Labs and a few other organizations working for the Air Force. I was informed that one of the places had a Exploding Wire Lab. As a electrician I couldn't understand why they wanted to explode wire.
I'd recommend some balance resistor across those caps. The capacitance can vary, so they might not share charge equally, i.e. one could have 430V across it, and the other 370V, causing degraded lifetime due to overvoltage. You can also integrate these as your bleeder resistors. Note too resistors have a tolerance, if you're running close to the bank max rated voltage, use 1% resistors :) Looks like a fun time, awesome video!
Very cool experiments, very awesome. Now what would be cool is if you framed some of the papers I think the larger explosive reactions would make great artwork and could bring in some cash. You might try different types and colors of paper to see how they look.
this calls for photonicinduction's capacitor bank. also for the switch you can use a spring loaded latch, so you store energy by pulling the latch, and then you can have a high power spring force the switch down, which should make it even more reactive. and I find the idea of a cartridgeless gun funny, shape the bullet so the wire is part of the bullet and have a chamber that explodes the back of the bullet. you could then use cast bullets. though I think then cooling becomes an issue if you want a decent rate of fire, as usually the casing is used as a heatsink.
I think this switch begins arcing before the contacts actually touch. Even if the switch contacts stopped moving at that point, the voltage drop across the gap will be a few percent of the voltage being supplied to the system.
Very nice. I've built a much smaller version of this where we found that some 50Ω resistor was the optimal bang. Our machine operated at 230V and the capacitors were just a random assortment ripped out from various consumer electronics. Used two 75W halogen lamps in parallel for charging and controlled quick discharging and a fairly beefy solenoid for output. It was only rated for 12 volts.. but it worked. We used an inverter that gives around 230V output for charging. One fun side effect of the emissive charging resistors were that we'd get a rather bright flash of light whenever it recharged after discharging. We called the contraption a "clap machine" because of the loud clap it produced. We found that if we took polyethylene and wrapped it around a resistor that we placed in a container with liquid nitrogen, after clapping, the PE would glow blue for around a second which was really cool and unexpected! Anyway, great presentation as always, keep up the good work!
So fun fact: explosive lenses are often made with several different explosives. A faster burning explosive on the outside then lights a slower burning explosive on the inside, with a shape such that the shock front forms the inside of a sphere when it’s all done.
Back in the day, specifically the middle 70s thru early 80s as a member of the Strategic Air Command, we learned a lot much of what you're talking about. We learned how bombs are not supposed to tick, so to speak.... and some outstanding discussions from the National Security aspect. Thank you so much for this, and we appreciate it very much and hope to see some more of your work
I worked in a building once where I had to be trained to stay away from the crazy insane ultra high power capacitors/transformers sitting on site. After learning about a man being (mostly) turned into plasma like that wire, high wattage electricity scares the crap out of me. Pls dont die man
Back in my university days, I worked with people that used exploding wires like this to form metal parts. Instead of semiconductor switch they used an Ignitron.
This is awesome, I wonder what other stuff you could blow up. Cast some in cement, concrete, plaster? Drill a hole in a rock a really tiny one and feed a wire through. Can you put it across some electronics and explode them, or a light bulb maybe even incandescent christmas lights, or use it to spot weld thick metal? Very cool!
Very cool video, informative on the nuclear devices front, too! As part of my job I routinely have to throw away slightly used but perfectly good parts like the giant AC and DC caps as well as SCRs. I'm talking 350VDC 12000uF caps, 700A on state SCRs (with 20000A ITSM ratings), that kinda stuff. I almost wish I could just send it out to people doing projects like this.
...and now you *HAVE* to lay out those strips and wires in shapes on pale wood to create art. Those patterns are amazing! ...and imagine what you could do with materials like sodium and calcium wires!!!
Years ago, I read a few stories about a woman who would go out into the desert and arrange explosive charges on a steel plate, then set them off, using the Munroe effect to incise art into the steel plates (recovered after they came back down).
Never forget the old fashion, electric studio flash units used in product photography. They are a ready made source of 400 to 2000v cap discharge circuits powered from mains.
What is your background? I've only seen 2 videos of yours and the details you get into are extremely impressive. I thought you were an HVAC tech based of your giant ice block vid and now this one makes you look like an electrical engineer. Very impressive!
Nice one man! It is very hard to thin film deposit material in atmospheric pressure, due to so many atoms being present. But with strong enough evaporation, you can, I guess, convince anything to bond atomically with anything else. That residue that your are leaving on the floors is nitric and oxide formations of the metal you are exploding! That means you are depositing ceramics, one of the hardest substances around, and a lot harder then the metal it stems from.
I've actually been doing some experiments with a 12.8kV, 52.3uF cap bank, and the thing is LOUD. When I don't do any current limiting across the output, the shockwave can be felt in your chest. I've run a few tests with it at 18kV, but that was a bit too scary for my liking 😅
I've thought about doing this with thin carbon rods underwater, in hopes of creating small or microscopic diamonds (or glassy/amorphous carbon) from the immense heat and pressure. Possibly something to test in future videos.
Suggest a few film capacitors (what wallet will bear) in parallel via high speed switches with a large electrolytic, and use a oscilloscope to determine when after the film caps are let on the bridgewire, the electrolytic is allowed on to the subsequent arcing plasma to dump bulk energy into it. There is also such a thing as explosive switching, where within a chamber, contacts subtly spaced (or for simultaneity, all spaced the same) are impacted by a explosively propelled impacting element that is electrically energized. The "explosive" part is not as scary as it may sound, it could be any propellent. The impactor is restrained by a mechanical fuse like a threaded rod turned to a small diameter somewhere along it's length.
Another direction to go from here might be rock breaking using electrical discharge mining techniques, simply send ~ 400,000V through a rock surrounded by distilled water or oil and the expanding plasma channel within the rock acts as an explosive. Requires a larger capacitor bank, but about the same principles as this project
I was just thinking today 'I'd love another hyperspace pirate video' and here it is. Better than expected too, which is really saying something. Thanks man!
In my first scientific/engineering job in 1968, we were photographing spectra of very brief high temperature plasmas in a shock tube. The camera shutter had to move 4 mm to go closed-open-closed, with a precision of timing measured in nanoseconds. it was propelled by an exploding #32 wire dissipating 200,000 Joules from an oil-filled capacitor the size of a small refrigerator through a krytron, pushing the 18mm dia. piston of a shutter assembly weighing less than 1 gram.
Your figure for the density of air at 4:49 seems wrong. Air is about 80% N2, 20% O2, with molecular weights around 28 and 32 respectively, so 1 mole (22.4 liters at STP) would weigh about 28.8g. Converting to g/cc gives 0.00129 g/cm3, about 60 times lower than your figure. So P/Patm would be about 60 times higher than 116 atm, about 7000 atm.
This is the FIFTH video in a row where the thing I have been interested in is what you post on! So thank you for your psychic powers, they are exactly what I need!
0:26 I can add FBI and Homeland Security to this list for thermite.... took lots of dicking around but got my charges dropped to handling fireworks without a licence.
Discharge resistors need to be connected to each capacitor individually! Not to edges! In other way You just got zero potential on edge end some potential in the middle. Resistor must work like balancer in multi-cell battery. Each capacitor has its own self-discharge current, and with time even if on edge you has 0 - in between you has some (potentially dangerous) voltage. and because of unbalance - you even can overcharge some capacitors. Half of capacitors be charged in opposite direction, which even worse for electrolyte.
BEST. CHANNEL. Thanks for the top notch content dude, amazing. Great that finally is a video on electronics, so I could keep up with the science of it all, contrasted to your mechanical/chemistry content. Such a great video. Cheers!!
The bucket flies up because the water is able to escape the bucket from the top but not from the bottom so the entire force of the water pushes the bottom of the bucket against the ground and launches the bucket in the air.
I can assure you that the FBI already knows this guy. He has been put under the microscope and filed under "Arrest if he ever buys a Quran - until then, just ignore this nerd" .
The reason the bucket flies is because the sides and top have give, but the bottom does not, this propels the water upwards away from the solid ground as the shock front hits, and because the sides of the bucket are sufficiently strong it contains the water and travels upwards with it. Equal and opposite reactions at work.
Awesome project! Never even knew this kind of response was possible. Very interesting stuff and super useful knowledge into the science behind getting the result.
Absolutely incredible project! Love this vid so much, technical stuff was explained perfectly and love the example of real world applications. Perfect phase too, i expect this one going nice and viral :)
I've been watching a lot of your videos lately and...... You might be my hero. I've been considering playing with refrigeration lately and now I have a way to make a loud noise without getting arrested :)
A spring loaded switch might be an electromechanical solution that would work for you. The spring needs to be pretty powerful though to prevent any rebound.
At these voltages and pulse lengths rebound is pretty much irrelevant. All the action occurs when the contacts get within ~1mm of each other and arc over, and is so quick the contacts may as well be stationary. They don't contact by the time the arc is done, much less have time to rebound.
Great exploding wire machine! I abandoned any pretense of using solid state devices for switching on my pulsed power generator. I just use a mechanically triggered spark gap switch with electrodes that come within about 0.5 mm of each other to avoid welding. Super reliable and no danger of premature firing. It will fire down to about 2000 volts but I normally fire at about 12,000 volts. I haven't tried exploding fruit yet because of the mess but I read that success is guaranteed if you thread a very thin wire through the fruit first to provide an initial low resistance path.
The bottom of the pail is separating the uncompressible water and the hardscape, and it flexes outward. I'm sure there's a small concave surface down there for the pail.
Thank you very much for making this video! I am currently (no pun intended) building my own exploding wire machine and the information and insight is greatly appreciated. Really good stuff I would not have known otherwise. Thanks. 🙂
Man, when I was a kid I thought of a bullet type that used plasma to eject the bullet in stead of gun powder (cordite?), big brain, I know, your video definitely scratched that childhood itch, thank you.
I’ve heard of plasma arcs being used to ignite the propellant in tank main gun ammunition in some experimental tanks, and also some proposals for tanks that use flammable gases as propellants with plasma arc ignition. Now I’m imagining a tank with enough voltage and amperage to send a shell down range with pure electricity…! Talk about “holy shit” factor! 😅😂
one of my favorite stories from working in a lab is when someone wired up a communications cable wrong and swapped VCC and ground. it dead shorted 28V at something like 1000 amps through a tiny 28 awg communication wire. the wire vaporized so hard and so fast that it left the insulation almost completely intact. the insulation just had a split down it length wise and not a trace of copper was left. i wish we were allowed to take pictures out of the lab because that picture of the empty insultation blew my mind. i also suspect it was a lot more than 1000 amps. it was a very very robust power supply meant to provide a staggering amount of current at 28v if needed
Forgot to mention, the channel has a discord server now:
discord.gg/dgcX4JDn
I just escaped a safe space & YT sends me to a channel talks about toxic stuff.
Okay!
So glad I clicked this video.
Literally a walk through of Basic exploooo, fireworks, and into higher radioisotope exploooooo, fireworks.
you were hired as a honeypot custodian aren't you?
Can u try it with Ferro serum rod Flint
You need to get in touch with the slowmo guys for this. Seeing the wire vaporise at 1mil frames per second would be awesome.
YES! I had been think the same throughout the video! #pinthis
I absolutely concur!
Or better yet, ballistic high speed.
@theslowmoguys should love it. Tech prep is done, device is functional (probably shipable) and the event very bright.
I would so watch that
By doing the explosion under the water, you were so close to something I did at the research institute where I worked a decade ago. When the parameters are right and your bucket is not ejected to orbit, you can make sol out of any metal. Basically, nanoparticles, suspended in the water. If you play around with the energy, you can somewhat control the particle size and change the colour of the solution. Cool stuff!
That sounds like it would be an interesting way to make Ferrofluid
Heh, why is it always explosions that make metal nanoparticles... one of the ways to get gold nanoparticles is to make it into explosive gold and then just blow it. Also works with acetylides like copper acetylide.
I don't regularly cuss in my comments however this crowd seems pretty FUCKEN cool so , YOUR A FUCKEN ROCKSTAR ! ! !
💥💥🤔 viscose metal water drinks . 🥳
@@VANHAMM "Energy" drinks! 😆
Regarding the bucket shooting up, I remember seeing someone explain this before. The shockwave through the water travels downward, reflects off the bottom of the bucket (which can't move further downward due to the ground), then back up through the water. The water moves upward so quickly that there's not enough time for air to mix with it, causing a vacuum to form between the bottom of the bucket and the body of water, lifting the bucket upward.
EDIT: Folks, please stop saying water is incompressible in the replies. That's a gross simplification of water's material properties - water *is* compressible, it just has a fairly significant bulk modulus and a positive coefficient of its bulk modulus with pressure, which is why it often appears incompressible - but that's ultimately irrelevant because transfer of momentum doesn't require a pressure differential in the first place.
I don't think you even have to reference a vacuum forming, as a similar thing can happen when you hit any object from the top. If the elasticites work well together, the object will bounce off of the surface. (though ofc the water pulling on the container by the vacuum and also probably just friction helps, too)
Basically yeah
The buckets walls expand out a bit from the pressure, then as it lurches back into shape it ejects the water up, the combination of it being shoved down from that makes it then springboard off the ground, surprisingly the more solid and inflexible a surface you use for this the more it bounces
The atomic trampoline videos from nilered kinda explain why
Why the bucket of water goes up.
TH-cam: What if a glass of water were LITERALLY half empty?
th-cam.com/video/0EytSWiKrFg/w-d-xo.html
approved comment : u
said u dont understand why the bucket goes up instead of down... with the VAB music .. u know it i bet it.. presure inside water does push also at the botom , botom of bucket expande , ground push against bucket .. resulting force is upward ..
This is why I don't trust physics, it's dark magic.
I love how casually he explains workings of nuclear weapons. GJ.
It's on Wikipedia in case you need a refresher course.
@@PyroteknikidThere are still some important details missing from Wikipedia, but more than was used here. Still some missing from Carey Sublette’s “Nuclear Weapons FAQ” Website but more than Wikipedia.
It was well explained in the movie Oppenheimer.
This is so great, it annoys me so much that no one with a high end high speed camera has documented electrical phenomena like this. The detail would be so amazing.
The Slowmo Guys need to get in on this.
@@JeffBilkinsor Ballistic High Speed
@@JeffBilkins or ballistic high speed
Plasma channel did it in video "Plasma Explosions Warped 400X Slower" on lover voltage capacitor
@@JeffBilkins They have , with ElectroBoom
you've done a better job at explaining RC time constant at 6:00 than my professors ever did
Not gonna lie, brother. About 80% of the time I have no idea wtf you're talking about, but it's really cool
*EXACT-A-MUNDO*
*yet it's the best way to learn cause something sticks forever*
*edit: that algebraic equation reminds me of Foghorn Leghorn with Egghead Jr scenes*
Sufficiently advanced electrical engineering is indistinguishable from magic.
100% here.
@@simon-pierrelussier2775 Neatly arranged and oftentimes microscopic runes made out of different minerals, transmitting energy in the form of particles that are and aren't, with electromagnetism being a force that we understand enough to use, and can explain with very intricate scientific theories... but at the end of the day we have no concrete explanation of why these fundamental forces exist
Was waiting for him to mention a turbo encabulator at one point 😂
You _absolutely_ need to make coils of thick wire, send the pulse through that, and put a coin in the middle of the coil so the lorentz forces crush the coin in on itself :D
You can start smaller and wrap wire around a soda can and watch it shear itself in half
What killed your SCR was probably exceeding its current rate-of-rise limit. When the SCR is triggered it takes a finite amount of time for the conduction to spread over the full area of the semiconductor disc. So having not enough inductance in the circuit causes the current to rise faster than the conduction area is able to spread over the disc, which kills the SCR via local overheating of the semiconductor disc around the gate connection.
This is actually an area where tubes are perhaps still used. Some very hardcore thyratrons.
That's exactly why I was thinking. A long time ago, I build a fuse testing device with a capacitor bank at 250V, around 500J, and to prevent this, I included an air-cored inductor just big enough to control the dI/dt to within the acceptable limit.
For many applications, an exploding bridgewire device only needs to work once. Otherwise, I wouldn't know how to fix this, other than using a thyratron, or maybe a triggered spark gap.
You should be able to increase the gate conductance area via increase gate current, I think over limiting of the gate inrush current caused the failure.
The maximum current rise rate might only be used if the gate trigger current is correct, it needs a very fast rise, high enough peak current and some hold time.
@zyeborm yeah I have worked on several pulsed power designs for particle accelerators and typically thyratron tubes are still more capable than the best semiconductor devices and for really high power the simple spark gap is still the regarding power handling capability
I enjoyed this massively. Thankyou for putting this video together. No nonsense, no tedious buildup, just PAYOFF, PAYOFF, PAYOFF.
At the chair where I completed my bachelor's, I had the opportunity to build a coin shrinker. It operated at 10kV and 500µF, packing quite a punch. My professor's doctoral advisor had such a device and wanted a replica for his chair. It was a great experience, especially for learning about safety aspects.
I can confirm that such blasts, with several kilojoules of energy, are mighty indeed. Hearing protection cannot be understated. In the first experiments, our primary blast shield was shredded. We underestimated the force quite a bit. And that was only at 7kV. Since then, we have agreed to only go to 5 or 6kV during the testing phase.
Afterwards, we installed a secondary blast shield and fortified the primary with metal. In a subsequent test, it cracked but held together.
Your build has great quality and even incorporates some aspects I would have liked to include in ours. However, we had to make compromises at several points because everything had to be designed for 10kV. It is similar in that the entire coil gets vaporized, but effectively, our goal was not to create an explosion, but to shrink coins.
We have to operate the primary switch from a distance of around 5 meters because it’s just too dangerous otherwise. A lever, like the one in your video, is not feasible. We use gravity-driven brass contacts that are activated with a thread.
I am actually considering doing my master's on this topic. The fact that plasma physics is involved is a great motivation. Still, I am searching for other opportunities that might also be interesting.
Someone in my family used a similar setup with a coil made out of copper flat rod and titanium membranes for physiology experiments. Turns out shockwaves can activate the heart’s conduction system in an etherized rabbit. The switch was a self-quenching arc switch that used HV trigger to start ionization in the gap, and then the design of the insulator around the gap used aerodynamics to blow the arc out. The whole thing was built in a tall 18” rack. Capacitors were HV oil types.
Oh, it could do 1kJ discharges at 10Hz rate :) Even had a TTL trigger input.
This is dope haha, I literally came here to suggest making a coin shrinker single-turn magnet
TIL about coin shrinkers.
@@absurdengineering Why not apply far less energy directly to the etherized rabbit?
As an aside:
4.184kj, while officially being 1 gram of tnt equivalent (as in the unit), 1 gram of tnt releases a bit less (closer to 4kj).
The reason 4.184kj was chosen is because that is EXACTLY 1 calorie.
So. 1 tera calorie is equal to 1 megaton of TNT.
Exactly one Calorie, technically.
4.184 kJ is 1kCal, not 1 Cal
@blyticaltwo yeah annoyingly there are calories and Calories and one Calorie = 1,000 calories.
@@magellanicraincloud TIL
Just think of the explosive power of a donut
Your neighbours must LOVE you
If he was my neighbour I would be out there watching every test with a tray of cookies
"Hey the noisy giant ice cube guy is inventing something new, wanna go see what it is?"
My name is Matthew and I like to party.
No, no they don't.
@@KerryTallishe disappeared the next day
This was a treat. I made a similar device many years ago in college using a 400uF 5kV energy storage capacitor. Sacrificial knife switches and a long stick ended up being the easiest way to trigger. I can relate to feeling the concussion of the pressure wave hitting your chest. Every once in a while I think about making another one, but at the time I didn't realize just how dangerous they could be and now I'm a bit terrified of them.
Up next: "Making uranium hexafluoride"
Yeah right! I was wondering why a video on exploding wires suddenly took a hard turn towards initiating a nuke.....
Part 2 : cascading ultracentrifuges in the home shop
Yeah, no one likes surprise visits from TLAs.
It would be useful because I have nothing to do with uranium @@zyeborm
Lets start with smth ez - TATP. ----> 1:50 xD
Regarding bleeding resistors, something that didn't hear mentioned here, is, they are not just in case you leave the capacitor bank alone. They are extremely important due to the memory effect, which slowly recharges the cap bank to a certain voltage. I'm not 100% sure, but at 18:22 there could be an example of it
Ive had my pulse cap dump to zero and rapidly gain 1KV back into it shortly after since its an 11KV cap and as you said, memory. Thankfully you can get ceramic disk resistors that can dump 100+KJ in seconds, useful for emergency..safe dumps!
Isn't that called dielectric absorption? It's also the reason why spicy capacitors come shorted or with a bleeder resistor.
I've seen that phenomenon but I've never understood why it happens.
5:22 *relatively nontoxic*
vaporized metals still arent great to be around but its not lead azide
And the NO2 that is clearly created should not be inhaled....
Regarding the flyback diodes blowing up: Even diodes from the same batch will have different reverse leakage currents, so when put in series, one will typically see a larger voltage drop, leading to rapid deconstruction. To ensure that the voltage is evenly split across the two diodes, you can add some high value resistors in parallel. Current through the resistors should be around an order of magnitude higher than the reverse leakage currents. You can also add some small parallel capacitors to help compensate for different reverse recover times. Great project!
EE here. Oh damn, I see you beat me to it.
mannn i love the physics behind each video plz dont get rid of them
Another idea I had was DIY high voltage capacitors made with aluminum foil and ~150 micron thick glass microscope slide covers as the dielectric layer. Not ideal, but the breakdown voltage is high enough that you can stack them in series a meter long, pot it, and charge it up to megavolts (albeit at nF capacitance) with very low ESR/ESL. Could make for some interesting content at low cost.
Would those be useful for pulses lasers?
@@flavortown3781 Yes, I think so. A much thinner version of them is used for DIY air (nitrogen) pulse lasers, many videos of those on youtube, but using plastic wrap instead of microscope slides as the dielectric between aluminum foil conductive layers.
As for why your flyback protection diodes blew up once you replaced the SCR with a mechanical switch, I think you accidentally constructed a crude boost converter. With an SCR the latching effect ensures that the trigger pulse causes continuous conduction in the switched path. However, the mechanical switch comes with a bouncing effect where slamming down that block of copper causes a rapid mechanical oscillation of connection and disconnection. This causes a large dI/dt which leads to a proportionally large voltage delta across the path inductance. The combination of the increased voltage across the diodes and repeatedly moving them in and out of conduction (probably violating their recovery time) would be sufficient to burn them up.
(On top of this, the two in series probably didn't help - this is probably a good use case for a gas discharge tube as part of the snubber network)
That sounds fascinating. I'm going to learn a lot once I translate some of that back into familiar English ;-)
Guarantee there were some massive circulating currents from that rough block literally bouncing. He should have invested in laying down some 55% silver braze and polishing the surface to within a few tens of microns for a more resilient and mechanically less bouncy contact surface.
@@sivalley Mechanical switches always bounce even if they're just big blocks of copper. You'd need some kind of a really hard spring system to slam the copper together to minimize the bouncing time but they'd still bounce a few times unless the copper is literally smushed from the impact of the switch closing.
@wombatillo more what I'm getting at is that copper oxides are not conductive but silver oxides are so there is less of a chance that one of those bounces will be a high impedance connection contributing to the back emf spikes
My only doubt with this theory is that switch bounce shouldn't be able to break the circuit.
At these currents, the voltage across an arc is in the range of 10-100 volts per centimeter, plus an extra 20 or 30V at the interface with the electrodes.
It would be interesting to use a gas discharge tube across the diode though, it definitely could confirm if this is what was happening.
Excellent video, I hope it goes viral for you, it has all the right ingredients. I am an electrical engineer and I have to say your explanations are great, you would make a good educator. I must say, I never even thought about exploding wire and just assumed chemical detonators were used in the 1940s. I mean wire strain gauges were just being invented near the end of the war. Those old physicists,engineers, and mechanics were very brilliant.
I think the exploding bridgewire was specifically invented for nuclear weapons, though they now have other, more constructive uses.
To be completely honest I had quite low expectations when I saw the title… but boy, was I wrong. After finishing the video this must be one of the more visually spectacular footage in your channel (and even on TH-cam as a whole).
Both the impressions and the slow motion look gorgeous. Keep up the great work!
Also, nice management of the ads. This is one of the few channels in which that content is decenly fun and worth watching.
Now this is what wire EDMs need to progress in the industry
Damn that was a lot cooler and more interesting than I initially thought
Damn this needs to be seen in a phantom camera
Would be interesting for the slowmo guys to film with
Ive been hooked since they filmed light in trillions of frames per second.
@@mrdwets8952 yes sir me too
Love the iterative approach and attention to safety. Very well documented. Well done!
Slowmo Guys collab would be good for some of these. The difference in speed between the wire exploding and then things like the bucket launching would give some nice content
A very good video. When I was kid I happened upon an old issue of Scientific American Amateur scientist where a exploding wire was used as a light source for high speed photography.
I was amused to see a mouse trap used as a high voltage high speed switch to connect the capacitors to the wire. This worked rather well for such a primitive method. I was able to
build a very dangerous 10 KV 4 uf of oil filled caps 200 joule rig. I have no idea how fast it was since I did not have or could afford a scope back then.
Reminds me of a fun time when I wanted to discharge huge standalone flashlamp capacitor but could not be arsed to look for screwdriver so I simply used thin tin/lead soldering wire with rosin core. Not sure if I ever regained full hearing.
Wonderfully edited and paced video. Much enjoyed it@
StyroPyro will proud of you :D
My first thought was this is StyroPyro territory
This is the best channel! Fun experiments, hilarious commentary, and I learn something! Oh yeah, and explosions are a huge plus
Hey babe, the fridge guy is back…
babe I'm going into fucking labour, stop watching TH-cam.
But now with nuke science.
Being an HVAC tech that used to operate naval nuclear reactors has caused me to fuse subject matter in ways that should not exist. Doesn't help that some buddies and I built a coil gun with disposable camera flash units and got yelled at by the school CO at Power School. He did have us demo it before confiscating and destroying it, thankfully the base CO did not get involved. We had done all the math by hand for how many turns of what size wire and how far apart to space the three stages on a Bic Cristal pen to fire .177 steel BBs.
Hide ya fridge, hide ya wire, they vaporizing everything around here!
This is awesome! I was looking into a way to make small explosions that could be repeated several times with similar characteristics for audio measurements - impulse response, basically. Thanks!
Potato canon you say? I think you're head into mini railgun territory 😂
He will make a CVP (copper vapour propelled) potato cannon
Mini hydrogen gas gun
@Daniel37643 lmao for sure. I mean, who else doesn't cook a spud using 2000 m/s friction 🤣
@trulyinfamous with that many joules, who needs gas? 😂
A rail gun that shoots freedom fries
In the late 1960s I was a young airman electrician assigned to Hanscom Field AFB in Massachusetts. There was Ratheon , Lincoln Labs and a few other organizations working for the Air Force. I was informed that one of the places had a
Exploding Wire Lab. As a electrician I couldn't understand why they wanted to explode wire.
I'd recommend some balance resistor across those caps. The capacitance can vary, so they might not share charge equally, i.e. one could have 430V across it, and the other 370V, causing degraded lifetime due to overvoltage. You can also integrate these as your bleeder resistors. Note too resistors have a tolerance, if you're running close to the bank max rated voltage, use 1% resistors :)
Looks like a fun time, awesome video!
You beat me to it.
Wow ..II have never seen such a simple chart that shows how a Nuke goes off. Well done.
Very cool experiments, very awesome. Now what would be cool is if you framed some of the papers I think the larger explosive reactions would make great artwork and could bring in some cash. You might try different types and colors of paper to see how they look.
this calls for photonicinduction's capacitor bank.
also for the switch you can use a spring loaded latch, so you store energy by pulling the latch, and then you can have a high power spring force the switch down, which should make it even more reactive.
and I find the idea of a cartridgeless gun funny, shape the bullet so the wire is part of the bullet and have a chamber that explodes the back of the bullet. you could then use cast bullets.
though I think then cooling becomes an issue if you want a decent rate of fire, as usually the casing is used as a heatsink.
I think this switch begins arcing before the contacts actually touch. Even if the switch contacts stopped moving at that point, the voltage drop across the gap will be a few percent of the voltage being supplied to the system.
Very nice. I've built a much smaller version of this where we found that some 50Ω resistor was the optimal bang. Our machine operated at 230V and the capacitors were just a random assortment ripped out from various consumer electronics. Used two 75W halogen lamps in parallel for charging and controlled quick discharging and a fairly beefy solenoid for output. It was only rated for 12 volts.. but it worked. We used an inverter that gives around 230V output for charging. One fun side effect of the emissive charging resistors were that we'd get a rather bright flash of light whenever it recharged after discharging. We called the contraption a "clap machine" because of the loud clap it produced. We found that if we took polyethylene and wrapped it around a resistor that we placed in a container with liquid nitrogen, after clapping, the PE would glow blue for around a second which was really cool and unexpected! Anyway, great presentation as always, keep up the good work!
Wow, I had to trust your math until I saw you explode that huge 14,000 amp SCR thyristor, mind blowing power proved.
man, the dramatic build up through the video is great
So fun fact: explosive lenses are often made with several different explosives. A faster burning explosive on the outside then lights a slower burning explosive on the inside, with a shape such that the shock front forms the inside of a sphere when it’s all done.
Detonating, not burning.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 Otherwise, yes exactly.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252isnt detonating just realy realy fast burning
The magic are the methods and particular shapes used. The Fat Man System was sooooo bad…
Awesome! Now I have a use for all those VFD caps I've been saving.
you are on all the lists right now
Back in the day, specifically the middle 70s thru early 80s as a member of the Strategic Air Command, we learned a lot much of what you're talking about. We learned how bombs are not supposed to tick, so to speak.... and some outstanding discussions from the National Security aspect. Thank you so much for this, and we appreciate it very much and hope to see some more of your work
I worked in a building once where I had to be trained to stay away from the crazy insane ultra high power capacitors/transformers sitting on site. After learning about a man being (mostly) turned into plasma like that wire, high wattage electricity scares the crap out of me.
Pls dont die man
It should. I'm an EE and that may be why I survived into adulthood.
I love the attention to detain you put into this video, straight to the point and concise.
Back in my university days, I worked with people that used exploding wires like this to form metal parts. Instead of semiconductor switch they used an Ignitron.
Was it the pressure from the wire vaporizing that shaped the metal part, or did they use pulsed magnetic fields to exert force on it?
@@odincauzza2509 They did research on both methods
This is awesome, I wonder what other stuff you could blow up. Cast some in cement, concrete, plaster? Drill a hole in a rock a really tiny one and feed a wire through.
Can you put it across some electronics and explode them, or a light bulb maybe even incandescent christmas lights, or use it to spot weld thick metal?
Very cool!
Very cool video, informative on the nuclear devices front, too!
As part of my job I routinely have to throw away slightly used but perfectly good parts like the giant AC and DC caps as well as SCRs. I'm talking 350VDC 12000uF caps, 700A on state SCRs (with 20000A ITSM ratings), that kinda stuff. I almost wish I could just send it out to people doing projects like this.
where do you work? and how can i get my hands on such mighty devices!?
Do they have a policy that doesn't let you keep them? Once they're in a dumpster they're generally fair game.
Man, this must be what i sound like when im talking about my niche interests to people who dont know about them. Nice video!
...and now you *HAVE* to lay out those strips and wires in shapes on pale wood to create art. Those patterns are amazing!
...and imagine what you could do with materials like sodium and calcium wires!!!
Years ago, I read a few stories about a woman who would go out into the desert and arrange explosive charges on a steel plate, then set them off, using the Munroe effect to incise art into the steel plates (recovered after they came back down).
Never forget the old fashion, electric studio flash units used in product photography. They are a ready made source of 400 to 2000v cap discharge circuits powered from mains.
The bottle covered with copper inside looks interesting! Maybe it's possible to deposit metals on things using explosions 😂
Spray-welding is already a thing. Considering it's oxygen, acetylen and powdered metal that is already an explosion happening in a controlled fashion.
What is your background? I've only seen 2 videos of yours and the details you get into are extremely impressive. I thought you were an HVAC tech based of your giant ice block vid and now this one makes you look like an electrical engineer.
Very impressive!
Nice one man! It is very hard to thin film deposit material in atmospheric pressure, due to so many atoms being present. But with strong enough evaporation, you can, I guess, convince anything to bond atomically with anything else. That residue that your are leaving on the floors is nitric and oxide formations of the metal you are exploding! That means you are depositing ceramics, one of the hardest substances around, and a lot harder then the metal it stems from.
I've actually been doing some experiments with a 12.8kV, 52.3uF cap bank, and the thing is LOUD. When I don't do any current limiting across the output, the shockwave can be felt in your chest. I've run a few tests with it at 18kV, but that was a bit too scary for my liking 😅
I've thought about doing this with thin carbon rods underwater, in hopes of creating small or microscopic diamonds (or glassy/amorphous carbon) from the immense heat and pressure. Possibly something to test in future videos.
Suggest a few film capacitors (what wallet will bear) in parallel via high speed switches with a large electrolytic, and use a oscilloscope to determine when after the film caps are let on the bridgewire, the electrolytic is allowed on to the subsequent arcing plasma to dump bulk energy into it. There is also such a thing as explosive switching, where within a chamber, contacts subtly spaced (or for simultaneity, all spaced the same) are impacted by a explosively propelled impacting element that is electrically energized. The "explosive" part is not as scary as it may sound, it could be any propellent. The impactor is restrained by a mechanical fuse like a threaded rod turned to a small diameter somewhere along it's length.
Excited to see what you have been up to!
BROOOOOO thanks . i have been yeeting my core for months now with no results. this is the tip i needed. thanks
bro is becoming more and more styropyro
Tbh Pirate did it better. I was think of Pyros series of car batteries the whole time but this is a much more elegant solution, Pryo brute forced it.
Except Styropyro's content is painful to watch because it's so disorganized and has crap sound and editing.
Dude, Best video I've seen in a while across the hole of TH-cam!! If i had that i would do so many things with it!
Another direction to go from here might be rock breaking using electrical discharge mining techniques, simply send ~ 400,000V through a rock surrounded by distilled water or oil and the expanding plasma channel within the rock acts as an explosive. Requires a larger capacitor bank, but about the same principles as this project
I was just thinking today 'I'd love another hyperspace pirate video' and here it is. Better than expected too, which is really saying something. Thanks man!
You really need to team up with the Slow Mo guys once. Would be great to see extreme slow mo of the wires converting to plasma.
that was the first i thought as well
In my first scientific/engineering job in 1968, we were photographing spectra of very brief high temperature plasmas in a shock tube. The camera shutter had to move 4 mm to go closed-open-closed, with a precision of timing measured in nanoseconds. it was propelled by an exploding #32 wire dissipating 200,000 Joules from an oil-filled capacitor the size of a small refrigerator through a krytron, pushing the 18mm dia. piston of a shutter assembly weighing less than 1 gram.
Your figure for the density of air at 4:49 seems wrong. Air is about 80% N2, 20% O2, with molecular weights around 28 and 32 respectively, so 1 mole (22.4 liters at STP) would weigh about 28.8g. Converting to g/cc gives 0.00129 g/cm3, about 60 times lower than your figure. So P/Patm would be about 60 times higher than 116 atm, about 7000 atm.
Wasnt expecting a lesson on nuclear devices, but i was nicely surprised.
I'll download this video ... just in case of
This is the FIFTH video in a row where the thing I have been interested in is what you post on! So thank you for your psychic powers, they are exactly what I need!
i am a physicist and greatly appreciate the physics sections for how much I learn from them
0:26 I can add FBI and Homeland Security to this list for thermite.... took lots of dicking around but got my charges dropped to handling fireworks without a licence.
What a great channel this is! It's awesome when TH-cam recommends something I really enjoy.
20:15 the fly back diode flew back at you😂
Discharge resistors need to be connected to each capacitor individually! Not to edges! In other way You just got zero potential on edge end some potential in the middle. Resistor must work like balancer in multi-cell battery. Each capacitor has its own self-discharge current, and with time even if on edge you has 0 - in between you has some (potentially dangerous) voltage. and because of unbalance - you even can overcharge some capacitors. Half of capacitors be charged in opposite direction, which even worse for electrolyte.
jupp, the same goes for the diodes that got destroyed.
BEST. CHANNEL. Thanks for the top notch content dude, amazing. Great that finally is a video on electronics, so I could keep up with the science of it all, contrasted to your mechanical/chemistry content. Such a great video. Cheers!!
13:08 your prompts for the AI. 😂
You should sell the charred paper as art. It is quite beautiful!
Your move, Styropyro.
The bucket flies up because the water is able to escape the bucket from the top but not from the bottom so the entire force of the water pushes the bottom of the bucket against the ground and launches the bucket in the air.
Time to end up on another watch list
I look at it as people caring about me :)
DOE frantically making notes. Lol
I can assure you that the FBI already knows this guy. He has been put under the microscope and filed under "Arrest if he ever buys a Quran - until then, just ignore this nerd" .
I have been waiting so long for someone to make this video. Thanks!
What no Flux Capacitors?
I feel asleep watching a diesel heating video and woke up to a nuclear bomb description? stayed for the wire explosions
@27:00 Blue flash?
The reason the bucket flies is because the sides and top have give, but the bottom does not, this propels the water upwards away from the solid ground as the shock front hits, and because the sides of the bucket are sufficiently strong it contains the water and travels upwards with it. Equal and opposite reactions at work.
Awesome project! Never even knew this kind of response was possible. Very interesting stuff and super useful knowledge into the science behind getting the result.
Absolutely incredible project! Love this vid so much, technical stuff was explained perfectly and love the example of real world applications. Perfect phase too, i expect this one going nice and viral :)
I've been watching a lot of your videos lately and...... You might be my hero. I've been considering playing with refrigeration lately and now I have a way to make a loud noise without getting arrested :)
A spring loaded switch might be an electromechanical solution that would work for you. The spring needs to be pretty powerful though to prevent any rebound.
At these voltages and pulse lengths rebound is pretty much irrelevant.
All the action occurs when the contacts get within ~1mm of each other and arc over, and is so quick the contacts may as well be stationary. They don't contact by the time the arc is done, much less have time to rebound.
Great exploding wire machine! I abandoned any pretense of using solid state devices for switching on my pulsed power generator. I just use a mechanically triggered spark gap switch with electrodes that come within about 0.5 mm of each other to avoid welding. Super reliable and no danger of premature firing. It will fire down to about 2000 volts but I normally fire at about 12,000 volts. I haven't tried exploding fruit yet because of the mess but I read that success is guaranteed if you thread a very thin wire through the fruit first to provide an initial low resistance path.
The bottom of the pail is separating the uncompressible water and the hardscape, and it flexes outward. I'm sure there's a small concave surface down there for the pail.
Thank you very much for making this video! I am currently (no pun intended) building my own exploding wire machine and the information and insight is greatly appreciated. Really good stuff I would not have known otherwise. Thanks. 🙂
Man, when I was a kid I thought of a bullet type that used plasma to eject the bullet in stead of gun powder (cordite?), big brain, I know, your video definitely scratched that childhood itch, thank you.
I’ve heard of plasma arcs being used to ignite the propellant in tank main gun ammunition in some experimental tanks, and also some proposals for tanks that use flammable gases as propellants with plasma arc ignition. Now I’m imagining a tank with enough voltage and amperage to send a shell down range with pure electricity…! Talk about “holy shit” factor! 😅😂
one of my favorite stories from working in a lab is when someone wired up a communications cable wrong and swapped VCC and ground. it dead shorted 28V at something like 1000 amps through a tiny 28 awg communication wire. the wire vaporized so hard and so fast that it left the insulation almost completely intact. the insulation just had a split down it length wise and not a trace of copper was left. i wish we were allowed to take pictures out of the lab because that picture of the empty insultation blew my mind. i also suspect it was a lot more than 1000 amps. it was a very very robust power supply meant to provide a staggering amount of current at 28v if needed
The Yeet got me. well played, great content!