Nanotechnology could have one fatal flaw - Explosions
Nanotechnology promises to make the future much more interesting, quite possibly more amazing, too. But it seems like there might be one serious flaw to the tech: that smaller particles means bigger booms.
Dust blows up more than more solid objects do. This is why a fuel air bomb is so effective: because they make the gas molecules as small as possible. The reason this works is all down to surface area. If you have a big chunk of explosive material, only part of it can combust at any given time. If you break if up, you’ve got more more of it exposed at any given time, which, for explosives, means a bigger boom.
Nanotechnology is, by definition, small. In fact, it’s smaller than small. It’s tiny. That means plenty of surface area, which means plenty of explosive potential for things that can ignite. A research team from Canada set out to see just how big a threat this could pose in the future, since nanoparticle ignition hasn’t been studied much before. They blew up just about every type and style of nanoparticle out there: the classic nanoparticle, a chunk of matter that is absolutely tiny, flocculent materials, which you can think of as the lint of the nanoparticle world, and hybrids, which are nanoparticles mixed with various liquids and gasses.
What they found is that nanoparticles are pretty darn explosive. And while they are dangerous in their regular state, they also like to clump together in mid-air, into loosely aggregated hunks like fuzzballs. These chunks are actually more dangerous than their unclumped bretheren, because it takes only one millijoule of energy to ignite them. In case you’re wondering, that’s very, very little. Think ignition from socks on carpet little.
The researchers did extensive testing, and you can find the complete results published in the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.
| Template by