TEXAS \u2014\u00a0Tucked in the back corner of Texas A&M University\u2019s (TAMU) Rellis Campus is a long, rusty tube. Connected to pipes supplying methane gas, at the turn of a key, the tube lets out a puff of smoke, dirt and a powerful roar.<\/p>\n
The site is used to create and study detonations.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s probably the largest research explosion and detonation tube like this in the world,\u201d said Elaine Oran.<\/p>\n
Oran is a professor of aerospace engineering at TAMU, helping oversee the tests and research done at the detonation facility<\/a> for just over a year.<\/p>\n \u201cI think you have to begin with this first question by asking what an explosion is and what a detonation is,\u201d she said. \u201cAn explosion is just a big boom; it generates a large shockwave. But a detonation is a very particular kind of explosion. It\u2019s driven by energy release behind it.\u201d<\/p>\n She added that \u201cdetonations are explosions that are driven by chemical energy release, nuclear energy release or even lasers putting energy behind the shockwave, making it go faster and faster.\u201d<\/p>\n TAMU published videos online<\/a>\u00a0showing the strength and intensity of the detonations. From the outside, people can see the large puff of dust coming off of the tube. But from the inside, people can observe the shockwave and the energy it behind it as it vibrates from one end of the tube to the next.<\/p>\n The force showed in the videos applies to research in multiple fields.<\/p>\n \u201cDetonations occur at just about every scale,\u201d Oran said. \u201cStars through to tiny, little things here on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n The formation of new materials is another observation the team has made.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that are created in these waves are called nano-diamonds, so they\u2019re very small diamonds,\u201d said Scott Jackson, an associate professor of aerospace engineering.<\/p>\n Jackson added: \u201cIf you have a larger facility, you can keep the pressures and temperatures high enough for longer that you can make these at larger scales or different variants of them.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the fields where the test findings are applied is in industrial explosion safety \u2014 Oran cited the Buncefield Fire<\/a> in 2005 \u2014\u00a0and the Sago Mine explosion<\/a> in 2006.<\/p>\n \u201cThe kind of information that we\u2019ll be getting out of this, as far as practical safety concerns, is very important for designing large systems,\u201d Oran said. \u201cIt affects regulations; in some problems, it will affect whether a material is safe to put on your body \u2013 it goes that deeply.\u201d<\/p>\n The tests conducted at the detonation site aren’t done by Oran and Jackson alone. They are joined by four students across the entire TAMU system: Emma Stewart, Tugba Karachau, Zach Widman and Clay Hicks.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a collective joy when they\u2019re able to conduct a test and feel the strength of the detonation tube firsthand.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could feel it in your stomach,\u201d said Widman, a first year PhD student. \u201cIt\u2019s just like a deep rumbling in your stomach when it detonates, and you know that [that] was different.\u201d<\/p>\n The group of students enjoy more than just the nature of their exclusive field of study. The hands-on experience is another asset to their program, like manipulating detonations with steel baffles.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can remove these baffles, we can change the spacing, and we can see how that all affects our detonation properties,\u201d Widman said. \u201cSpeed, the length of DET, and those factors.\u201d<\/p>\n The facility also proves to be a learning process when it comes to day-to-day operations.<\/p>\n The facility is expected to open operations to private companies later this spring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TEXAS \u2014\u00a0Tucked in the back corner of Texas A&M University\u2019s (TAMU) Rellis Campus is a long, rusty tube.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12926,836,132,1570,102,163,138,223,82,2220,27,29,28,1569,835],"class_list":{"0":"post-150923","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-andres-rendon","9":"tag-app-education","10":"tag-austin","11":"tag-ctv","12":"tag-dallas","13":"tag-education","14":"tag-el-paso","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-san-antonio","17":"tag-science","18":"tag-texas","19":"tag-texas-headlines","20":"tag-texas-news","21":"tag-texas-what-you-need-to-know","22":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}