Contact Chemistry Work for Chemistry. Institute for Quantum Computing. Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology. Provide website feedback. The University of Waterloo acknowledges that much of our work takes place on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples.
Our main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. Our active work toward reconciliation takes place across our campuses through research, learning, teaching, and community building, and is centralized within our Indigenous Initiatives Office. Skip to main Skip to footer. An explosive is a chemical compound or mixture that does the job.
The explosive decomposition of nitroglycerin illustrates several features common to explosions:. First, the reaction is exothermic, meaning that it releases energy.
Second, it produces several gaseous products, all of which expand as the released energy raises the temperature. Finally, the reactants include the element nitrogen. Why do so many explosives contain the element nitrogen? The irony is that nitrogen gas is a very stable compound at a very low energy state. But when it is formed from reactants that start out in a very high energy state, a very large amount of energy is released in the process. Why do explosive compounds react so rapidly?
One way to speed up a reaction is to thoroughly mix the reactants. Mixing allows for immediate contact to occur. You may have read about explosions in flour mills and grain elevators. Even otherwise harmless substances like flour can explode violently if thoroughly mixed with air and ignited by a spark. Molecules of explosive compounds like nitroglycerin or trinitrotoluene take the mixing step one step further. For these compounds all of the reactants are on board the same molecule.
Immediate contact is assured. What caused the ammonium nitrate in the holds of the ship to explode without the use of some other explosive? Chemists found that the answer was in the bag.
The ammonium nitrate fertilizer was packaged in plain paper. The cellulose used to make paper contains a large amount of the element carbon. It was the carbon and ammonium nitrate mixture that reacted to unleash the tragic explosion. By analyzing the circumstances surrounding the Texas tragedy, chemists began to appreciate the power and potential of ammonium nitrate-based explosives.
An effective, relatively safe, and inexpensive explosive called ANFO ammonium nitrate fuel oil was developed. And there were no risky transport problems to be solved. To make ANFO, ammonium nitrate and fuel oil were mixed at the blast site.
But ANFO was limited as a commercial explosive. Ammonium nitrate is water-soluble. As it gains water, the energy necessary to initiate its reaction with fuel oil increases to levels making it useless as an explosive.
Dupont chemists went to work to produce a form of ammonium nitrate that would detonate even in a wet environment. Next Element Oxygen. What's in a name? From the Greek words nitron and genes , which together mean "saltpetre forming. Say what? Nitrogen is pronounced as NYE-treh-gen. Nitrogen was discovered by the Scottish physician Daniel Rutherford in
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