This is a hot dog/sausage/wiener about to be cooked from inside out. Apply 3 kJ from a pulse capacitor charged to 6 kV and the iron wire vaporises with many thousands of amps. The explosive energy is discharged in less than a millisecond.
“Continue reading” for more details and photos.
The exploding hot dog disappears in a flash and bang. Apart from some fine mush and a few greasy spots on the shed the majority seems to have vanished into another dimension.
I was asked by Discovery Channel USA to do an exploding hot dog. Really the result was so underwhelming that it would not translate at all to TV. A watermelon was suggested. Against my predictions, however, exploding a watermelon was dramatic and gave a great explosion that could be seen in slow-motion.
However…
If you only connect the ends of the sausage to the pulse cap then what?
The left photo above shows a hot dog across the terminals . The centre photo shows the flash at 3 kJ. The right photo shows the result. There was no charring, explosions or even any marks. Why? Well, a fatty sausage (wiener / hot dog) has a resistance which is surprisingly high at 200 k Ohm. So the cap bank charged to 3 kJ at 7 kV will deliver a peak current of only 35 mA. Certainly not like the 100 kA it could deliver.
The bang was certainly there (with an echo like a rifle shot) and the cap was completely discharged.
Related pages
Exploding wiresTry something else
Pyrolytic GraphiteExternal links
Cooking Hot Dogs with mains power
Photo Date: Feb 1, 2006