Operation
Pipe bombs concentrate pressure and release it suddenly, through failure of the outer casing. Plastic materials can be used, but metals typically have a higher bursting strength and so will produce more concussive force. For example, common schedule 40 1-inch wrought steel pipe has a typical working pressure of 1010 psi, and bursting pressure of 8090 psi, though the pipe sealing method can significantly reduce the burst pressure.
The pipe can rupture in different ways, depending on the rate of pressure rise, and the ductility of the casing material.
- If the pressure rise is slow, the metal can deform until the walls become thin and a hole is formed, causing a loud report from the gas release but no shrapnel.
- A rapid rate of pressure rise will cause the metal to act as a crystal and shatter into fragments, which are pushed outward in all directions by the expanding gases.
Read more about this topic: Pipe Bomb
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you dont have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (182595)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (18591941)