Explosive Rope: Unraveling The Mysteries Of Detcord

[Music] this video is brought to you by global ordnance go check them out at www.globalordnance.com hello my friends and welcome to a new episode here at ordnance lab i'm jake the mad scientist and yes i did i shaved my head i'm not trying to impersonate lex luthor uh hispanic style or i did not join a hispanic gang i just find it more convenient but moving on you know you might have noticed this giant roll of rope here i'm wondering what's going on here well it's decor the magical rope of destruction and we use it all the time here in ordnance lab for various different reasons but you know and there's a lot of misconceptions i've heard a lot of people say what you know make comments about what decor can do which is just not right so today we're going to make a you know rather lengthy video explaining what all decor can do can't do and you know what what does it consist of so today we have a series of different demonstrations to show you what det cord is and uh let's get to it so what is det cord well it's basically rope with an explosive core nothing much to it this crude diagram will give you a better idea what decor consists of the core of decor is a secondary explosive normally petn but other explosives are used such as rdx or hmx the explosive core is wrapped with a synthetic fiber layer such as nylon or polyurethane this varies by manufacturer but is normally synthetic material the outer layer normally consists of woven synthetic fibers but can also be simply plastic tubing once again depends on the manufacturer these two layers provide both waterproofing and also gives it great tensile strength strong enough to survive an attack from a world domination deranged cat or for use as a leash to walk a weapons lab decor comes in various sizes depending on grain amount in the us it's grains per foot brain being a very goofy measurement where there are 7 000 grains in one pound for the rest of the world decor is measured in grams per meter for example this strand here is approximately 1 foot long and is 25 grains so there are 25 grains of ptn contained in the length of the decor that is approximately 1.6 grams of petn roughly two blasting caps besides being very tensile decor is very safe to use setting this small strand on fire simply causes the petn core to rapidly burn away now this doesn't mean that it's fire safe and you can toss a role into a bonfire decor simply doesn't detonate immediately when exposed to flame with enough fire though it will detonate so don't do it it's also rather impact safe we took another strand and attempted to set it off with a hammer but with no success [Music] our first demonstration of its explosive potential involves this length here attached to a plywood witness plate you will see that the small amount of explosive will punch right through the wood without issues let's see what it can do well that was pretty cool as you can see uh that little strand of decor did a number on this segment of plywood um i mean wood is a phenomenal absorber of energy i mean if you're shot at it with you know with with a firearm the wood does a good job of slowing down projectiles because it's many layers of fiber which does it disperses the energy not not too dissimilar from say body armor which as many layers of kevlar or other synthetic fibers and as it strikes the fibers don't get out of the way so they absorb the energy over a larger area and that's what sort of what wood does though this is plywood so it has different layers that are glued but it punctured right through perfectly and well not perfectly but as you see it just makes a neat little you know cut in it over here is where the detonator was and here's the rest where the strand was and you can see it's pretty powerful right but let's move on to something more realistic let's say if we wanted to try and cut down a tree limb so what we'll do is we'll take a couple wraps of decor head over to a tree branch and then see if we can cut the branch off um depending on which branch we choose but we'll we'll head over there take a look and then show the setup and then set it off and see if the branch comes right off our target is this we satch tree that shawn deemed to be removed sean wrapped two portions of the tree with two separate decor charges each charge was then linked with a decor bridge so they can detonate in sequence okay so we have two different charges as you can see here one at the thicker point of the trunk and one here where it branches off a little bit and it's a little bit thinner the branch here is about a little bit over two inches and then the main trunk right here is a little bit over three inches so sean wrapped around here a ton of det cord about 15 feet we're about five meters and then this one is about seven feet or a little bit over two meters and it's connected by this line of deck cord that is woven into both this is going to act like a basically is like a big compression around the tree and it's going to compress the wood in which wood is really good at dealing with is compression and same thing up here also ideally you want to put a large amount of explosives on one side to shear the tree over because then you can use the weight of the tree but we're going to demonstrate how this decor works against a fresh wood because this tree is still alive so we'll put an electric blasting cap get to a safe distance and see how this thing performs so you can see the deck cord performed rather well in cutting the wood now wood is really tough to cut with explosives you need a good amount of explosives or a focused amount of explosives such as a shaped charge or in this case wrapping the deck cord very concentrically in a small area so a lot of the energy is concentrated in a small point versus say up the tree where you're wrapping it constantly you're splitting the force across the wood which will prevent the wood from getting cut and both of them cut like a laser beam right nice and flat like right here and same thing right here the wood took a lot of the energy well it took all the energy obviously and split it open now i don't know how old this tree is it's still a little bit wet so yeah it still managed to go through and down here with the uh five meters of decor or 15 feet it cut the thicker trunk no problem and then up here with the two ish meters the the seven feet it also cut it pretty well of course we wrapped it on top of each other we spread it all out it wouldn't have worked but this is a good a good demonstration of how powerful decor is let's move on to something more difficult say metal we found the steel pipe which is an ideal target to demonstrate decor against metal the total thickness of the pipe was about four millimeters making it a decently sturdy target for this demonstration we then wrapped two meters of decor around the middle of the pipe in a tight pattern to ensure the explosive force was focused to a small area so you can see the pipe is still intact despite almost six feet or two meters give or take of decor wrapped around it and wrapped in a very tight pattern so we did the same pattern of where we put all the decor in a small area like with the tree that we did a little earlier and it cut it perfectly like a laser whereas with this pipe it simply crushed it and that's because metal is not wood go figure and it's it is hollow which does change the behavior of how this pipe would have behaved see if it was solid we'd had a different outcome it's still being crushed into this it wouldn't have been as crushed we might have had a separate amount of warpage it all depends but this tubing obviously can go inward whereas the wood the explosive has to the wood absorbed all the energy and then it breaks away in layers because it is layers of cellulose but you can see that the decor has its limitations and if i wanted to cut this pipe i would have used something different say a larger amount of high explosive or a shaped charge or a heavier grained decor if i decided to opt for decor because that was my only option but in this case it was not the best choice but there's more of a demonstration to show that decor is not always the best item for cutting materials such as something a little bit more heavy duty such as metal there's a there's obviously better options but decor does have other great uses and let's go take a look at another use for decor all right so we're down here at our demolition range freshly burned from a previous video you might have seen where we cleared it off because normally you use a tractor but this was a little bit more fun although a little bit more risky but i have a conundrum for you what happens when you have multiple explosives and one detonator or one a source of ignition well decor is your solution so det cord being consisting of petn is an outstanding detonator as well actually some blasting caps depending on the manufacturer use ptn as the base explosive others use tnt others use rdx it really all depends but it's an outstanding secondary explosive so you can use it to transmit explosive or a detonation shockwave across large distances as long as you let string out the deck card and detonate other explosives at remote at different locations with only one detonator so for in this scenario we're going to do is set three different explosives separated from each other varying distances we're not going to be too exact about it just enough so that you see that they're clearly not causing a sympathetic detonation from being too close to each other and they're going to be detonated by decor and we're going to detonate the debt court at one spot and it's going to detonate all three it'll seem simultaneous but in reality it's going to detonate at different times because the detonation velocity is so fast the camera is not going to pick up each detonation individually when they occur you need a pretty fast high speed camera for that which we're working on getting on so we're going to set the charges up i'll explain which each one is so you have an idea what's going on we'll set the cameras up and we'll watch this thing kick off so the first and largest and most powerful charge of the three is the tnt charge so these are actually seismic charges that are made to be synced all together but it's a kilo of tnt tnt is tnt if you add something to it you obviously change the explosive and it becomes something else but for now it's just straight tnt and you can see it right there there's the raw tnt and it's already pre-wrapped with some det cord sean already did the honors for us and he did a pretty good job of wrapping it and then tying it off so tapes is not always sufficient because remember this is not a fuse it's going to detonate and when it does it can whip off so it's important to secure it onto the explosive so that you have adequate contact as well as it does not uh dislodge or get loose or something or and then you get it you don't get a detonation now there's also a cap weld to these so he feed it he feeded some debt cord in there just to ensure some detonation uh it might be overkill but it doesn't hurt to have too much uh detonation source versus not enough because then obviously wouldn't detonate so we're going to place this at the furthest corner from our blast site so it is uh because it is the largest charge and then we're going to move to our next charge which is going to be down this way with the smallest charge towards us and the two strongest ones furthest away from us all right so let's go to the next one so our second charge is a little over half a kilo of an ammonium nitrate based explosive it's similar to a monol but it's a mixture that we make but it has a slightly higher detonation velocity than mono so since it is a canister and it it's also square we would still wrap the decor around it just like any other explosive in a canister it doesn't this is obviously an improvised canister not a prefab one so we'll do is we'll make say about three wraps of decor around this and that is sufficient to set off this explosive and it's also important to know how sensitive the explosive is so say for example tnt being far less far more sensitive than c4 you would obviously use far less decor for say tnt than say for t for c4 for this one because it's fairly sensitive we don't need that much explosive so three wraps to dead cord at most is always necessary we've used this particular explosive mixture before with great success with about that much of a decor so we'll place this one down set it with decor and then head to the next charge so the last charge we have here is ready prime which is an emulsion explosive and this is actually consisting of also ammonium nitrate but is emulsified along with a fuel source and some other additives to create a paste and this is commonly used in the blasting industry for with like commercial like mining or whatnot because this replaced dynamite because it is a thousand times more stable way more uh insensitive and also very cheap it's incredibly cheap explosive that's why i like using it a lot sometimes just for moving earth around we're going to set it here and then we're going to detonate from one point uh all the charges and we'll hopefully we can get the camera to kev and capture it all and then we'll review what it looks like here is a quick breakdown of the tandem charges with a drone shot the first charge to get kicked off the emulsion charge is here right over here is the ammonol charge and right over here is the tnt charge the approximate distance between each charge is 3 meters give or take [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well i think that worked the drone shot gives us the best demonstration of debt cord setting off the charges in sequence this still shot shows the first two charges detonating and the explosive shockwave transmitted via the deck cord this second still shot shows all three charges detonating it's hard to see the decor of the second segment as the tnt blast overwhelms it but you can clearly see all three charges detonated in sequential order due to the det cord the blast was so powerful that it knocked over our gopros so that was a bummer it would have given a decent slow motion shot oh well that was pretty cool right i love doing these detonations and if you do it right you can set up the sequence so that it fires in a really neat pattern of course you need a slow motion camera to really appreciate that and we're limited by what cameras we have but you can see from the still frames in the slow motion video that it started here transmitted the shock wave down the det cord to the next charge and then traveled right over here to the last charge was the tnt and it did a good job of clearing out a lot of the brush it's what we hoped for it to do now moving on uh decor is really really good at detonating explosions or explosives and in sequence or in tandem or if you daisy chain them but it's also good at doing other things let's take a look at that for those of you who are big fans of hollywood explosions they always have a ton of fireballs in reality explosives don't produce a lot of fireballs that's an incomplete combustion or just a slow combustion right well in this case we have a bunch of propane tanks that we have wired with the deck cord and then a pyrotechnic kicker so what this is going to ideally do is it's going to rupture the tanks and disperse them it's under pressure so it's going to disperse anyway but the decor is going to cut them open spread the propane dead cord will initiate a cause of fire will it ignite combustion sure absolutely it's not the most efficient means of doing so so it is a concern this is why you have to be very careful and if it doesn't that's what the pyrotechnic charge is there for to ensure that the propane once it reaches the stoichiometric ratio with air will start to combust so we'll do is we'll put a blasting cap on this one set get to a nice safe distance and see how it works find the hole [Music] the slow motion playback shows that most of the propane tanks ruptured and properly dispersed the propane as desired to create a great fireball not as big as hoped but it got the job done you can see a few got launched and we're still burning post-explosion a solid demonstration that they are tougher than they appear for our last demonstration we'll attempt to make a bigger fireball with a commercial propane cylinder we will set this one off with a two-third pound of moles and charge on top of the tank several meters of decor wrapped around the tank to ensure it cracks open and a pyro charge beneath the tank to ignite the propane let's see if this works better than the small propane tanks well that was a bit anti-climactic you know even we were expecting some form of fireball and explosion from this but we just simply got the standard you know uh explosion from the uh emulsion charge on top and the debt cord what we were supposed to happen or we were estimating to happen was the explosion would have or the explosive charge on top would have cracked the uh the can open uh the decor would have helped uh crush the can open a little bit more and then the pyro charge underneath would set off the propane but obviously that didn't happen and that's just it is that dick cord isn't this magical amazing device that can cut through anything it has its limitation as you can see here it did crush this propane can quite a bit and i gave it several wraps and yet it's still pretty much intact the the main charge is what ruptured this thing open the pressure did the rest from the propane even though propane is a lick when it's under pressure it's in a liquid and it doesn't wrap it it rapidly expands absolutely because it wants to go to a gaseous state but under pressure it's a liquid when if you watch in the slo-mo you could see the the explosion is there's a cloud possibly of the propane we didn't really smell much of it it's um they get they put a mercaptan or usually a some type of smelling agent that makes propane very unique so you can identify ah that's propane but nothing detected and obviously we didn't know fireball but it didn't have a neat little crater down here and this is uh there was a smaller credit pro 4 which we used to put the pyro charge in here that was supposed to come up and set off the the propane cloud but as you can see the decor is not hollywood magic it can't do everything that it's claimed to be especially uh setting off these propane tanks which shows that you know these things are actually quite safe that's actually quite impressive but it gives you an idea of the limitations and the ideal uses of debt cord i hope be sure to like and subscribe youtube i tell you the algorithm sometimes it loves us sometimes they hate us but be sure to like subscribe hit the notification button and stay tuned for another episode here at ordnance lab thanks for watching if you like this 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Channel: Ordnance Lab

Views: 400,210

Keywords: slow motion, det cord, slow mo, science, engineering, entertaining, informational, informative, detcord, detonation cord, detonation, explosion, explosive, fireball, fire, pyrotechnics, pyrotechnic, exciting, slow motion video, NFA, shockwave, Detonating cord, explosives, High-Explosives, Bomb, Ordnance Lab, TXMGO, What is detcord, How does detcord work, Can I buy detcord, Where to buy detcord, How do I buy detcord

Id: sC-sXsuhh-k

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 27 2021