ABSTRACT
He held out to me a grey tube with a diameter of about 12 mm and a length of 50 cm, that looked rather like a piece of spaghetti and said, ‘It would be very interesting to measure the speed with which this thing burns in the middle and at the edges. We are studying the rate of burning of such powders at pressures of tens of atmospheres. It seems logical that the central part of the tube should burn more slowly than the edges. You’ve already obtained X-ray pictures of bullets in flight. Do you think it might be possible to use your technique to study phenomena during the combustion of powders?’
