Meet an engineer who blows things up to help preserve lives and property

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, the explosion expert Sam Rigby talks about his research, which focusses on protecting people, buildings and vehicles from explosions.

A structural engineer at the UK’s University of Sheffield, Rigby chats about the physics of explosions and describes a testing range that he and his colleagues use in the nearby Peak District. He also discusses the difficulties of understanding how a large blast will propagate through an urban area and explains how social media videos of the 2020 Beirut explosion informed his research.