Major furnace explosions have resulted in the deaths of personnel, extremely expensive repair costs and, in most cases, loss of revenue during the repair period. For a large power station boiler the total cost of a furnace explosion could easily be in the $10M to $20M range. The protection systems fitted to a modern boiler have been developed to the stage where boiler explosions are a rare occu...

Grain dust explosions at elevators are in reality a series of explosions. The first explosion referred to as the "primary explosion" is usually small with pressures less than 2 pounds per square inch, (psi). It propagates a pressure wave and fire front. The pressure wave moves away from the location of the primary explosion at a speed of about 1000 feet per second (fps) while the fire front fol...

The motivation for devoting a Theme Issue to explosions is discussed. As subsequent articles in the issue are written with the assumption that the reader has had a certain amount of previous exposure to the subject, some of the history and necessary background information are presented here. The topics on explosions that will be encountered in the remaining articles are previewed. Finally, seve...

We argue that detonations of sub-Chandrasekhar mass white dwarfs can lead to bright explosions with light curves and spectra similar to those of observed Type Ia supernovae. Given that binary systems containing accreting sub-Chandrasekhar mass white dwarfs should be common, this suggests that a non-negligible fraction of the observed Type Ia supernova rate may arise from sub-Chandrasekhar mass ...

One of the principal motivations of wide-field and synoptic surveys is the search for, and study of, transients. By transients I mean those sources that arise from the background, are detectable for some time, and then fade away to oblivion. Transients in distant galaxies need to be sufficiently bright as to be detectable, and in almost all cases those transients are catastrophic events, markin...

New challenges and problems emerge everyday with the current wave of terrorism. Suicide bombing, and explosions – a phenomenon only believed to be exist in the battlefields – witnessed and experienced by thousands in civil settings. Traditional approaches and conventional solutions often fail to understand the emerging problems, and help us mitigate the effects. When modeling explosions for inv...