Deflagrate

Terminology of explosive safety

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. As explained above, a deflagration is a subsonic reaction, whereas a detonation is a supersonic (greater than the sound speed of the material) reaction. 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.