Explosions and implosions generate heat, but could they vaporize a human?

Both explosions and implosions create heat to some extent, and vaporization can occur when things get very hot, but only under the right circumstances. The phenomenon sees liquids transition into a gaseous state when enough energy is released to break the intermolecular forces holding them together.

Vaping is a dramatic phase change that requires a lot of power, but it has its limitations. From boiling kettles to the heart of atomic bombs, vaporization can accomplish things big and small, but is it theoretically possible to vaporize a human being? Does it occur in implosions as well as explosions? And what have some of the most devastating events in history taught us about its power?

Explosions vs implosions

Explosions and implosions are actually opposites, and let’s start with the former first. There are different types of catalysis for explosions, such as some chemicals mixing to the point of heat or particle collision. Nuclear explosions can occur through fission (atomic bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion (hydrogen bomb), creating temperatures of about 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), seven times hotter than the center of the Sun.

An implosion occurs when there is a sudden collapse due to a pressure imbalance, something deep-sea submersibles such as the recent Titan disaster are vulnerable to. That’s because submersibles are highly pressurized vessels that must be incredibly strong to withstand the crushing pressure of deep-ocean diving, but an implosion is not the same as a rapid decompression, which can also be deadly.

An implosion is essentially a very rapid crushing event, but it’s not caused by the release of energy in the same way that an explosion is: the energy (pressure) is already there surrounding the object, it’s just that the The object’s ability to resist this pressure suddenly changes (its strength is overcome in some way, it bends, etc.), Dr. Sam Rigby told IFLScience. Rigby is an expert in blast and impact engineering and senior lecturer in civil and structural engineering at the University of Sheffield.

Think of it as a fault line on the earth’s surface; it will be able to resist the pressure and movement up to a certain point, then it will jerk suddenly and violently (causing an earthquake). Now imagine this all around the outside of an obstacle, with the jerking motion inward. It’s an implosion.

For comparison, the deepest point on earth, the Mariana Trench, is less than almost 11 kilometers [6.8 miles] of water. The pressure acting immediately after an explosion is approximately 2,500 kilometres [1,553 miles] of water! Thus, you can see how the energies involved in implosions and explosions (at least on earth) are different by orders of magnitude.

Can implosions and explosions coincide?

Sometimes implosions and explosions can be linked, as is the case with collapsing stars. The pressure inside stars is maintained by nuclear combustion which generates heat and pressure. The superheated core is pushing outward while the surrounding gravity is pushing inward, forcing all that energy into the smallest possible sphere.

When the fuel runs out and a massive star begins to fail, the pressure drops enough for it to succumb to gravity, which is able to take over and collapse within seconds. The collapse occurs so rapidly that it creates huge shock waves, exploding the outer part of the star in what is known as a supernova, the largest explosion ever seen by man.

Implosions and explosions also combine in atomic bombs, which begin with the collapse of a core of fissile material. This increases the density and therefore the probability that a neutron will strike a nucleus of a heavy unstable isotope, which splits in what is known as fission.

The splitting releases fragments and huge amounts of energy, and the fragments fuel a nuclear chain reaction. Sounds slow, but that chain reaction takes about a millisecond before an atomic explosion occurs that releases a huge amount of heat and gamma radiation.

What is vaping?

Vaporization is caused by rapid heating hot enough to break the bonds that order whether a substance is solid, liquid, or gaseous. Known as intermolecular forces, their rapid destruction causes a phase change that can instantly turn a puddle of water into a puff of steam.

For a physical explosion, the temperature of a liquid in a closed container increases. The increase in temperature will increase the pressure of the liquid, Professor Jackie Akhavan, an explosives chemistry specialist and head of the Center for Defense Chemistry at Cranfield University, told IFLScience. If the pressure inside the container becomes so high that the container bursts, a change of state from liquid to gas occurs. This is vaporization.

Sounds like the stuff of Bond villains, but evaporation is a type of vaporization and something anyone who has ever boiled a kettle has seen. For water, the heat of vaporization at 100C is about 2,230 joules (533 calories) per gram, and the resulting vapor carries a lot of heat energy, which is why it’s a great working fluid for engines.

Vaporization in explosions

The instantaneous heating required to achieve vaporization is the bread and butter of thermal explosions.

Explosions are violent chemical or nuclear reactions that release a huge amount of energy in a very small volume, Rigby said. When that energy violently expands outward, it leads to the formation of a shock wave, which is the root cause of the damage (seen in events like the Beirut explosion in 2020).

Explosions, particularly nuclear bombs, also release large amounts of thermal radiation and visible light (about one-third of the energy of an atomic bomb is released as thermal radiation). This can cause objects in the immediate vicinity to instantly heat up and vaporize, becoming so hot that they almost instantly go from a solid to a vapor state.

Can items be vaporized?

Vaporizing a physical object like a bicycle isn’t technically possible because vaporization involves taking a liquid and turning it into a gas. The phase change that sees a solid object skip the liquid phase and go directly to gas is known as sublimation, but heated objects can melt and then vaporize, as in the Rope Trick effect (seen in the video above).

High-speed imaging from early nuclear tests showed a strange mottling of the fireball’s surface. This was found to be caused by vaporization of the steel tie rods that held the bombs in place, Rigby explained. The heat radiation from an atomic bomb is so significant that US citizens during the Cold War were encouraged to keep their homes clean and freshly painted to reduce the risk of them catching fire!

Can a human be vaporized?

Humans and animals can be partially vaporized theoretically because they contain a lot of liquid. According to the US Geological Survey, up to 60 percent of the adult human body is made up of water, but after an explosion, you’d expect at least some remnants of the remaining 40.

You may have seen the human shadow of death imprinted on a stone step that was in Hiroshima on the day the atomic bomb was dropped. It is thought that a person was sitting there waiting for the bank to open when the US air raid took place, and many believe it is the shadow left by a vaporized human. However, this is not the case.

When the blast of extreme heat and gamma radiation we discussed earlier was released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, that energy was absorbed by living or inanimate objects in its path, but the force bleached their surroundings. . The shadows left mark where people died, which would have been instantaneous, but their bodies weren’t turned to vapor by the explosion.

Theoretically, at what temperature would a human vape?

It goes without saying that trying to vaporize people isn’t good or smart, but a study in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics explored the idea. Building on previous research by the same authors who calculated the energy required to vaporize a skeleton, he found the total dissociation energy for the body’s water constituent and the remaining tissues (which were represented by dried pork).

By analyzing the individual dissociation energy of each of the major constituents of the human body that we have described, we were able to determine the total amount of energy required to fully vaporize a 78 kg adult person, concluded the authors. This has been calculated to be 2.9910⁶ kJ.

That’s the equivalent of about 710 kilograms (1,565 pounds) of TNT, but before you add it to your cart, it’s important to remember that it’s not that simple.

However, it is important to realize that obtaining a complete instantaneous vaporization of a person would require the calculated vaporization energy to be applied evenly over a short period of time. Therefore, fully vaping a human would in practice require a very high power input.

Can implosions trigger vaporization?

An explanatory video recently went viral claiming to portray the most likely scenario for the Titan’s implosion, but falsely claiming that the implosion would heat the air in the submarine around the surface to the temperature of the sun. The implosions produce heat, but temperatures inside the submarine would not reach the 5,500 degrees Celsius (10,000 degrees Fahrenheit) as seen on the solar surface. The relatively small amount of heat generated by an implosion in this context would also be rapidly removed from the mass of cold water surrounding the ship.

Vaporization and implosions combine in the case of pistol shrimp which can lock their claws at speeds of around 100 kilometers per hour (62 miles per hour). It is so rapid that it vaporizes by creating a cavitation bubble which then collapses in an implosion, producing sound and light in a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence.

For all the science fiction surrounding vaporization, explosions and implosions, vast and miniature, it seems that many misconceptions remain at the heart of these powerful events.

Real-life explosions are very different from typical Hollywood explosions (although I hope Mr. Nolan bucks the trend with Oppenheimer’s new movie!), Rigby said. We’ve been led to believe that explosions are great flashes of fire that we can see with our eyes, but they’re actually much faster and much, much more violent. Reading about the Rope Trick effect really revealed to me what an alien world it is like in the first moments after an explosion.