Hi,
As the engineering corps by us blow up buildings, they bring new explosives with them. They also made me think about those explosives types they are dealing with. The famous type of explosive is of course the TNT.
This explosice material is so famous and wide spread, that the material is used as as the unit of explosives for all other explosions, including nuclear bombs and astroid crashes.
There are bags of 5 kg TNT in the IDF, but I have not seen any such bag here in Gaza. They do however uses mines with TNT, the one with camouflage color (called the M-29) is with TNT.
The famous explosive you always see in the cartoons by the way, the Dynamite is not used here, or in general in the IDF.
Another type of explosive material is the Comp-B, a short for combination-B, which is a mixture of TNT and RDX (another type of explosive material). It is the main explosive material of the M-15 land mine that they are using here as well.
The combination of two materials (TNT and RDX) makes Comp-B 33% more strong than pure TNT.
A new explosive material I have seen here is the HMX. In Hebrew they call it Hanamex (which is the combination of the words Hanam – acrynom of explosive material, and HMX). The Material is kind of jelly, and come in a 12 litter jericans.
The HMX explosive is about 70% stronger than the TNT, and 28% stronger than the Comp-B material. None knows the name origin and some assumptions are: High Melting Explosive, High-velocity Military Explosive, or High-Molecular-weight RDX (as it close to the RDX).
Take Care
Gad
A M-29 mine which use TNT as main explosive material.
M-15 land mine that use COMP-B as main explosive material
A 12 litter jerican of HMX explosive material