Honestly, I’m watching a war movie and a dude got hit by an IED. It got me thinking though, and I don’t quite get what is the lethal factor in an explosion?
There always seems to be fire in the movies, and it’s clearly a lot of force. But my question is what ACTUALLY happens to (I guess anything) that gets hit by a large bomb/explosion from a play by play/physics situation?
I feel like this is kinda dark, but I just had one of those curious moments and felt like this was the appropriate place to ask
In: Physics
The fire is just for the benefit of the movie. Movie explosives tend to include a lot of gasoline or other fuel to get that nice big fireball. With the exception of weapons that are designed to create fire, real-world war explosives don’t care about fire.
When an explosive weapon goes off, it essentially releases a whole lot of energy at once. And this is weaponized in two main ways.
There’s going to be a massive pressure differential as the explosive’s energy ‘pushes’ the surrounding air aside. This pressure wave is so powerful that it’ll pretty much rupture the soft parts of your body if you’re unfortunate enough to be in the blast radius. Even if your body manages to stay in one piece, it can just squish the soft bits like your organs.
Most explosives are also designed to produce shrapnel. Shards of the bomb’s casing, objects like nails that were packed in with the bomb. A hand grenade has that pineapple pattern just to create more surface are and thus more shrapnel when it explodes.
Shrapnel goes flying in every direction pushed by that pressure wave, that energy release when the bomb goes off. And it will shred anything nearby. It will cut through bodies, sever limbs, go straight through light materials like car paneling.
And of course, since bombs are weapons, most are designed to achieve specific things. Some landmines are spring-loaded so they jump up to chest height before exploding. Vehicle mines are often shaped in such a way that they guide most of the explosive force upwards into the vehicle above instead of exploding equally in all directions.
Anti armor munitions often have staged explosions to help them penetrate armor before doing something nasty to the crew inside a tank.
Thermobaric bombs are designed to create a long-lasting explosion that uses up all of the oxygen in an area, rupturing the lungs of anyone unfortunate to be in the very large blast area. It’s perfect for clearing out caves and tunnels where direct shrapnel wouldn’t hit people.
But the basic idea is that explosives produce a devastating pressure differential compounded by shrapnel.
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