Big Ideas Lab
How does something explode?
3,316 words · 7 speakers
Ancient China. Winter.
The sun begins to set, slipping behind the ridge. The wind cuts cold. Wood is scarce. To survive the night, villagers turn to what's available: An invasive, fast-growing plant: Bamboo. The goal is simple:
Warmth. Survival. But from the fire, they hear something:
A loud blast. The huddled circle around the fire jolts backward. As the hollow bamboo stalk ruptures, trapped air is superheated and expands, releasing its energy all at once. Fear turns to curiosity.
What just happened?
It's a very, very broad subject. Also a very old subject. In Asia, they were using energetic materials over a thousand years ago,
long before equations, long before laboratories. People were asking the first version of the same question scientists ask today: How does something explode?
We've learned, through trial and error, a lot about energetic materials since then.
From bamboo stalks and winter fires to gunpowder packed into cannons. From the sharp crack of a match head to the split-second inflation of a car airbag. From mining blasts that carved tunnels through mountains to rockets igniting, lifting thousands of tons of steel into orbit.
There's still quite a bit left to learn.
Today, that question: How does something explode? Shapes the decisions that keeps our nation safe, guides manufacturing, and pushes technology to explore extremes no human could survive. And it all happens in the Energetic Materials Center.
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At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, developing explosives begins with understanding energetic materials.
Energetic materials are anything that releases their energy quickly.
Meet Laura Lininger, Director of the Energetic Materials Center, or EMC.
The mission of the Energetic Materials Center is to be the hub of subject matter expertise for explosives and energetic materials.
For more than 35 years, the Energetic Materials Center has designed and tested the rapid release of energy. Energetic materials have far-reaching consequences. Not just because they release energy in a flash, but because understanding that flash keeps people safe. They reveal threats before anyone is in harm's way. They uncover forces that could reshape cities or protect nations. They guide decisions that prevent disasters before they happen.
The amount of energy that is in our explosives and energetics is not necessarily that different than, say, a high-sugar candy bar. Your Snickers bar has a whole lot of energy in it, but it takes you a long time to digest that, so I'm not really worried about the national security impacts of your Snickers bar. But with high explosives, that energy is delivered in fractions of a second. And so it's not just the amount of energy, but it's the time over which that energy is delivered that makes it so impactful.
The expertise the EMC provides supports critical national security systems.
Homeland defense over the last 20 years has been an important national security mission area for us. When 9/11 happened, we were at the center of helping the United States respond to the concerns that we had about future terrorist events, about the impact of improvised explosive devices, how we needed to make sure that we protected this country.
But while 9/11 evolved the mission, EMC's work in national security stretches back to the Cold War, to a responsibility far older and far heavier.
The real threat to our security isn't the danger of bankruptcy. It is the danger of communist aggression.
The nuclear deterrent rests on a central principle.
Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms. Each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension.
Maintaining a safe, secure, and reliable stoppile to help prevent conflict and maintain strategic stability.
Our job is to underpin strategic deterrence with the science, engineering, and technology. And that's really how we show up for nuclear deterrence in order to give confidence that the United States is going to have a safe, secure, and reliable deterrent.
Anchoring that mission means solving scientific problems at extraordinary levels of complexity and ensuring the materials behind the deterrent can ultimately be produced safely, reliably, and fast enough to respond to new challenges.
In order to do that, we need to be the best at our game. That means we have the smartest scientists, engineers, chemists, technologists, and support staff to be able to understand the fundamental science of explosives. We can look at things from different perspectives because everyone has a seat at the table at the EMC and a voice that is heard. And because of that, we can tackle amazingly complex problems and make solutions for the country. And I feel like that makes us very special.
Collaboration makes this kind of complexity manageable because the answers don't sit at one scale. They begin at the smallest one.
We want to go all the way back to the fundamental material properties. We combine modeling and simulation with experiments. We can do large experiments. We have capabilities here at our Livermore site to go up to 10 kilograms of explosives. So that's kind of like a five gallon bucket filled with explosives. But then we can also go down to less than 10 milligrams. So that would be almost difficult to see less than 10 milligrams. If you're looking at a dime coin, that's kind of like the eye on the face of the coin. We will look at things across the scales, from the powder that
goes into the explosive, all the way to how it becomes a part, and then how it would interact with other components, either in a weapon system or in a protective system.
Inside a high explosive, chemical bonds break and reform in a chain reaction, releasing energy almost instantaneously. When that energy moves through the material, it doesn't drift, it detonates.
Here's Alex Gash, Deputy Director of the EMC.
Explosives can undergo a bulk phenomenon called detonation. Probably heard of it, right? And in detonation, what you're getting is you have a shockwave that is, for example, if you take a piece of metal and a hammer, and you take the hammer and you hit the piece of metal, and you hear the big bang, you're putting a shockwave into the material. With an explosive, you put a shockwave into the material, and you get the material to react. And so the shockwave is going faster than the speed of sound in the material. It's trundling through. Now, if the material doesn't react, that shockwave dies out. But if there's something you start that can actually sustain that shockwave
or even accelerate it, then you can actually get a propagating, and it's a detonation. And so with chemical explosives, what you have is you have some type of stimulus that starts this shockwave. But then the chemistry takes over, and the chemistry is very, very, very, very fast. If you have a shockwave moving at nine kilometers a second, that's an extreme condition. It's moving fast, it's generating massive, massive pressures, in the gigapascals, and temperatures that are like 4,000 degrees Kelvin. So there's a lot going on under those extreme conditions.
Nine kilometers per second is almost 10 times faster than a rifle bullet. At those speeds, chemistry becomes motion. And once it starts, it cannot be paused.
That's incredibly fast. And you can imagine capturing that reacting front and the chemistry that's happening behind it at that rate is really, really hard.
We understand a lot about explosives. But what happens at the tiniest scales and in the first fractions of a second remains a mystery.
And that's actually one of the challenges we have. One of the still unanswered things is... Looking at the chemistry in what we call the reaction zone.
The reaction zone is the first tiny window of detonation, where a shock wave triggers the chemical reactions that release an explosive's energy. But scientists are still learning what happens in those first microseconds.
We really would like to understand the chemistry of what's happening behind that shock front. The energetic materials community across the world would like to know those types of things.
EMC exists to answer these questions, to discover the secrets hidden inside materials that cannot be stopped, only observed.
We get products that are only stable for very, very short periods of time because they are inherently unstable. But knowing the energetics of that's important. So that's where we utilize the extreme experiments under extreme conditions. So some energetic materials go well in detonators, others go well in boosters, others go well in larger charges. And depending on where it's going to be used, we have a different set of specialized tests. Fundamentally, all of them, we need to know things like detonation pressure, detonation velocity, and what we call initiability. That is, how easy is it to ignite the material with a shock wave?
A lot goes into just one single experiment.
Explosives don't forgive mistakes. When curating energy designed to release all at once, there is no second attempt or margin for error. Safety depends on measuring force as it transforms matter and on containing it before it escapes. Moving through that kind of chaos with precision requires control at every level, control that doesn't happen by accident, control found at the high explosives application facility.
Looking for a career that challenges and inspires? Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a power grid dynamics engineer and a transmission grid engineer, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering, and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing, and scientific research, all within a collaborative, mission-driven environment. Discover open positions at llnl.gov/careers, where big ideas come to life.
Did you hear something? Mm-mm. Huh. Weird. Ah, it's nothing.
You could be standing outside the building and not know that they are detonating explosives in sight.
This is the High Explosives Application Facility, or HEIF.
Most of the technical aspects of the MC are housed in our High Explosives Application Facility.
It is unique, as far as we know, in the Western world. Over 120,000 square feet of explosive space that has been designed specifically to contain any sort of detonations.
This is a facility at the Livermore Laboratory where we have all the scientists and engineers effectively under the same roof. We do experiments on a particular floor of the building, so the principal investigators can talk to one another. So it's really meant to be an academic model where you've co-located the expertise as well as the facilities and capabilities.
Eventually, scale does become necessary. A 30-minute drive from the Livermore campus, an experimental remote test site has been built to contain forces that most places couldn't survive.
Site 300. The experiments conducted here reveal how energetic materials behave at full scale, providing the data needed to ensure they can be produced safely and reliably by the teams who manufacture them.
When we get out to our Site 300, they have a complete containment environment. They do have an open firing facility, which is the sort of thing that you probably would see if you're watching TV or watching documentaries on explosives. But they have a contained firing facility that is reinforced, concrete-built bunker, and they do experiments inside of it. And those experiments can go up to 60 kilograms, which is quite a large blast.
Impacts from the experiments aren't released into the air. They're absorbed.
They also scrub all of the air that comes out of it. It is actually cleaner coming out than it probably was when it came into the building. So we try and minimize any potential impact that we would have on the environment, on the other animals and the environment that we share our space with.
Physical containment is only one layer of protection taken when testing explosives. The rest comes from people and procedure.
They involve a material that has significant safety concerns, right? So we have to have a special facility. Staff have to be specially trained, specialized instrumentation.
Our explosive operations team is amazing and quite capable of keeping all of these facilities in state-of-the-art condition with the best-in-class, modernized diagnostics.
These diagnostics record the inner workings of the blast as it happens, analyzing pressure, velocity, and temperature. What would vanish in microseconds becomes measurable and usable.
Computation is a big part of it. It requires a lot of work between experimentalists and computational folks. The computational models are such, they can tell us the right types of experiments to run. So we still need the two together. I don't think they'll ever be separate, but they definitely complement one another. We have gotten to a point, actually, with a lot of stuff where we have a lot of confidence in our models. Instead of running 10 experiments, we can run eight simulations in one experiment. They're intensive from a computing power standpoint. That's why the DOE National Laboratories have intensive and large supercomputers. The latest one we have at Livermore now is El Capitan.
The work begins long before the lab lights turn on. By the time an experiment is assembled and the hardware comes together, many of the unknowns have already been narrowed. Part of the preparation now includes another kind of technology: robotics.
One of the nice things about robotics is ideally, they're doing the process the same every single time. There's just natural variations in things that happen between different people doing it, different day, that type of thing. The idea is that robotics would uniform it. We actually have some active areas, and actually, some of those are some of our outward-facing sides of the EMC.
Even small variations in how energetic materials are prepared can change how they behave. Robotics helps remove that variability, creating a more consistent starting point for experiments. And for how those materials can eventually be produced.
We are recognized nationally and internationally as having the capability and the expertise and experience to solve problems, some of which are longstanding problems, some of which can evolve really quickly. And we need to have quick answers. For example, 15 or so years ago, there was a need from a lot of first responders. If we come across something, how can we quickly identify if it's something we should be worried about?
Researchers at the Energetic Materials Center were able to develop portable test strips to help.
I've got an unknown white powder here. What is it? Is it flour? Or is it TNT? And so there's a kit called the Elite.
Easy Livermore Inspection Test for Explosives.
Here, a color change to dark pink is seen. The color closely matches ammonium nitrate. An explosive in the inorganic Color change to pink is seen. The color closely matches RDX. An explosive in the aliphatic
Instantaneous change in color to orange indicates a positive for peroxides.
We worked with an outside partner to actually manufacture them. We use them because it's really nice. It's quick. It's like, OK, quick color change. Oh, yeah, that turned red. Oh, that's a nitramine. We have to worry about that. Or no, no color change. We're good.
That's fundamental chemistry translated into immediate protection. For problems to be addressed rapidly, the EMC needs to be integrated into governmental agencies and collaborate across multiple industries.
It's not just us working alone. We have a large network of partners across the country. The other national labs, especially our partners at Los Alamos and Sandia, the DOE National Security Laboratories. But we're part of a larger network of DOE science laboratories as well and making sure that we're working across all of those. Working with our production partners, the folks who actually have to manufacture the designs that we create and working with industry and academia, Department of War. So it is definitely an integrated partnership.
It's an important part of us being able to get our business done.
That often extends to working with TSA in explosive detection.
We work with transportation security to understand what they can do to try and enable highly effective detection as fast as possible. Because they don't want people to have to wait in line of security for a half an hour for their suitcase to get through the X-ray detection. What is the constituents of an explosive? And how can you detect that? And how can you detect that with high accuracy? Those are the sorts of technologies that we develop here for our core mission. But they can then be applied to improve national security.
While the work may expand, the core of the mission remains the same. Understand the material, reduce the risk, protect the nation.
It has not necessarily evolved that much since we started 35 years ago because the nuclear deterrent is just as important now as it was then when we first started. We're the place where discovery is going to be meeting delivery. We take the fundamental bits and pieces. We make sure we understand it at all the different scales and levels. And we turn that knowledge into delivery for the strategic deterrent, for a national security partner, for homeland security. We are delivering solutions to the problems that concern our country as it relates to high explosives and energetic materials.
The Energetic Materials Center responds to today's threats and tomorrow's. Training scientists and engineers who know how to work across disciplines, who understand both the physics and the consequences, who can carry decades of hard-earned knowledge forward and build on it.
It's a multidisciplinary subject. You have to know a little bit about a lot of things. And it takes a while to get up to that. So we spend a lot of time mentoring. The demographics of our EMC change significantly in the, like, say, the last seven or eight years. We have a lot more earlier career people. And I think one of the big things is going to actually sort of grow them into being the leaders in the area of energetic materials.
National safety isn't maintained by standing still. It depends on curiosity, rigor, and the ability to adapt. It depends on a new generation, ready to take on the problems they haven't seen yet, with the science, judgment, and responsibility to meet them. The blast is brief. Their responsibility is not.
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At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing, and scientific research, all within a collaborative, mission-driven environment. Discover open positions at llnl.gov/careers, where big ideas come to life.
Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated