An explosive is defined as a process which develops gasses very quickly. In the ordinary black gun powder the gasses being developed there is carbon dioxide which everyone knows these days of the green house effect, and sulfur dioxide and some nitrogen oxide, and this is a mixture you know was invented in China, it was 1200 years ago or more, yea, about that. You mix carbon and sulfur and saltpeter and you get reacting and this develops actually not so very rapidly, but it develops rapidly carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide and the gasses developed can then push a cannon ball out of the barrel. And it was not very efficient in the beginning, but has become more efficient later on. Now these days….but it’s a very nice picture actually, on what nano, on what the nano thermite is because in the gun powder, you have the ingredients I told about these chemical partners we have to react. In the gun powder, it is also a mixture of powders. It’s carbon and it’s sulfur and it’s saltpeter. But in modern explosives, the two partners are now in the same molecule which means that the trajectory of the electrons have to do when getting from one side to another is much smaller and this is why TNT or nitroglycerin or dynamite which are….they are so efficient because there the two partners are in the same molecule, and these are explosives. Now what happens when turn you ordinary thermite into nanothermite is that you are approaching the same situation as in a molecule with the classical explosives. There is a convergence between what we call bulk materials and what we call molecular materials and they are converging into nanotechnology. So you get the best of two worlds. You get all the energy of the thermite. There is more energy in the thermite than in dynamite or TNT. There is more energy in the thermite, but the classical thermite is slow. But when you convert it into nano technology it becomes fast and so you get an explosive which is more efficient than the classical explosives. It is smaller, cheaper, and nastier.
