4 ms·

I don't know about that, but you could probably make some sort of thermite-phone, with a flammable body ignited by the energy in the battery. If done carefully

I don't know about that, but you could probably make some sort of thermite-phone, with a flammable body ignited by the energy in the battery. If done carefully, you could possibly have the thing behave like a fully functional phone until ignited. Doubt it'd bring down an airliner but it'd cause no end of panic and chaos onboard.

jacquesm 11y ago
Being somewhat practical oriented I've half a mind to try to see what kind of a 'bang' one could get out of a cellphone or laptop battery but I have two worries: the first that it will succeed, the second that it will succeed a bit too well resulting in people no longer being allowed to bring laptops and cellphones on board of airliners and I have enough enemies as it is ;) It's strange that nobody tried this to date (or at least, I can't find any hard evidence about people trying to blow stuff up with cell phone or laptop batteries).
- duncan_bayne 11y ago
  A fully charged 1000mAH 3.7V battery contains ~ 13kJ of energy. One gram of TNT gives you ~4kJ. So at best - assuming you had some way of efficiently exploding a smartphone battery - you'd get a couple grams of TNT yield. I suspect shocking, burning or smoking would be a better route to weaponising a smartphone. Edited: for comparison, the muzzle energy for a .50BMG round is ~15Kj. Bearing in mind you get ~4kJ from a gram of TNT, this explains why being shot hurts so much :)
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Laptop batteries do 200-400 Kj, that's 50 to 100 grammes of TNT. I'm not sure how much damage one could do with 100 grammes of TNT but surely you could find more than just one laptop battery to work with. Working grenades use anywhere from 50 grammes or more of TNT filler. The damage would very much depend on how fast you can liberate that energy and how well you could focus the blast.

4 ms·

I don't know about that, but you could probably make some sort of thermite-phone, with a flammable body ignited by the energy in the battery. If done carefully

by duncan_bayne 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago
Being somewhat practical oriented I've half a mind to try to see what kind of a 'bang' one could get out of a cellphone or laptop battery but I have two worries: the first that it will succeed, the second that it will succeed a bit too well resulting in people no longer being allowed to bring laptops and cellphones on board of airliners and I have enough enemies as it is ;) It's strange that nobody tried this to date (or at least, I can't find any hard evidence about people trying to blow stuff up with cell phone or laptop batteries).
- duncan_bayne 11y ago
  A fully charged 1000mAH 3.7V battery contains ~ 13kJ of energy. One gram of TNT gives you ~4kJ. So at best - assuming you had some way of efficiently exploding a smartphone battery - you'd get a couple grams of TNT yield. I suspect shocking, burning or smoking would be a better route to weaponising a smartphone. Edited: for comparison, the muzzle energy for a .50BMG round is ~15Kj. Bearing in mind you get ~4kJ from a gram of TNT, this explains why being shot hurts so much :)
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Laptop batteries do 200-400 Kj, that's 50 to 100 grammes of TNT. I'm not sure how much damage one could do with 100 grammes of TNT but surely you could find more than just one laptop battery to work with. Working grenades use anywhere from 50 grammes or more of TNT filler. The damage would very much depend on how fast you can liberate that energy and how well you could focus the blast.