• Question: what is your favourite exploding experiment.

    Asked by aye-aye to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      I don’t do many experiments myself, but in real experiments in real physics labs, explosions only really happen if things go very badly wrong!

      Explosions in our low-temperature labs usually wouldn’t be the kind with flames and fire. We have a lot of low-temperature liquified gases. The thing with gases is that they expand when heated. If a 100l container of liquid nitrogen were to be heated up somehow (say a short-circuit in an experiment), the 100l of liquid nitrogen would expand almost instantly to 6,000l litres of gas. This would be enough to blast open any container it was in and push all of the oxygen out of the room. With no oxygen, fire can’t burn, so there would be no flame.

      I’ve never heard of this happening, but we do have oxygen sensors in our labs just in case smaller gas leaks occur!

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