Deflagration

Deflagration (Lat: de + flagrare, 'to burn down') is subsonic combustion in which a pre-mixed flame propagates through an explosive or a mixture of fuel and oxidizer.

[1][2] Deflagrations in high and low explosives or fuel–oxidizer mixtures may transition to a detonation depending upon confinement and other factors.

[3][4] Most fires found in daily life are diffusion flames.

[5] Deflagrations are often used in engineering applications when the force of the expanding gas is used to move an object such as a projectile down a barrel, or a piston in an internal combustion engine.

Deflagration systems and products can also be used in mining, demolition and stone quarrying via gas pressure blasting as a beneficial alternative to high explosives.

When studying or discussing explosive safety, or the safety of systems containing explosives, the terms deflagration, detonation and deflagration-to-detonation transition (commonly referred to as DDT) must be understood and used appropriately to convey relevant information.

Distinguishing between a deflagration or a detonation can be difficult to impossible to the casual observer.

Rather, confidently differentiating between the two requires instrumentation and diagnostics to ascertain reaction speed in the affected material.

Therefore, when an unexpected event or an accident occurs with an explosive material or an explosive-containing system it is usually impossible to know whether the explosive deflagrated or detonated as both can appear as very violent, energetic reactions.

Therefore, the energetic materials community coined the term "high explosive violent reaction" or "HEVR" to describe a violent reaction that, because it lacked diagnostics to measure sound-speed, could have been either a deflagration or a detonation.

[6][7] The underlying flame physics can be understood with the help of an idealized model consisting of a uniform one-dimensional tube of unburnt and burned gaseous fuel, separated by a thin transitional region of width

In equilibrium, thermal diffusion across the flame front is balanced by the heat supplied by burning.

Now, the thermal flame front propagates at a characteristic speed

, which is simply equal to the flame width divided by the burn time:

This simplified model neglects the change of temperature and thus the burning rate across the deflagration front.

As a result, this derivation gives only the laminar flame speed—hence the designation

Damage to buildings, equipment and people can result from a large-scale, short-duration deflagration.

The potential damage is primarily a function of the total amount of fuel burned in the event (total energy available), the maximum reaction velocity that is achieved, and the manner in which the expansion of the combustion gases is contained.

When flame velocities are low, the effect of a deflagration is to release heat, such as in a flash fire.

At flame velocities near the speed of sound, the energy released is in the form of pressure, and the resulting high pressure can damage equipment and buildings.