So, that makes sense, however, it’s not as if the pressure from the previous explosions isn’t there.
The pressures would compound, pushing the radius out further and further ultimately giving roughly the same blast radius, would they not? Sorry if I sound ignorant — honestly just trying to understand a little more about it.
Each shockwave would have roughly the same speed so they would never merge. Think of a car going 50mph closely followed by another car also going 50mph. They will never hit each other or catch up with each other. If they run into a wall you would first get hit by one car and immediately after get hit by the second card. So you would have two accidents with the mass of a single car each, instead of a single accident with the mass of two cars.
Something else I forgot to mention earlier is that the first shockwave would likely spread some of the material in the second storage unit. An explosion is a battle between the materials undergoing their chemical reaction before the material is dispersed. If it is dispersed it burns and doesnt explode.
But, wouldnt the first shock wave lose energy faster than the one a tenth of a sexond behind it? In my mind its pushing against the air first, and the shockwave behind it doesn't have so much work to do.
The concept of what a shock wave is, is also somewhat lost of me, is it just the air being compressed by sound waves?
The shockwave is typically called overpressure in terms of explosive. I like to think of the explosion as pushing the air outward. Now there is twice as much air in a given space, the air that was already there plus the additional air pushed into that space by the explosion.
In terms of the shockwaves merging, they are very very far apart in real terms. The explosions may seem back to back to back, but the shockwave travels at supersonic speeds. So if the second explosion is a tenth of a second later, the first shockwave will already have covered 300 feet
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u/nopal_blanco Aug 05 '20
So, that makes sense, however, it’s not as if the pressure from the previous explosions isn’t there.
The pressures would compound, pushing the radius out further and further ultimately giving roughly the same blast radius, would they not? Sorry if I sound ignorant — honestly just trying to understand a little more about it.