Watch the Diesel effect in ballistic gelatin

I've never heard of hackaday.com, but their video showing the explosion of vaporized ballistics gelatin heated up due to the Diesel effect is pretty awesome.

There's full detail below (taken from their article), but the basics is that a bullet vaporizes some of the gel (made of combustable material). That gas expands then quickly collapses. As the volume of a gas decreases rapidly, the pressure increases. As the pressure increases, the temperature rises drastically...resulting in the above ballistic fart.

Ballistic gel is a broad term referring to a large chunk of dense gel generally used in firearms-related testing to reliably and consistently measure things like bullet deformation, fragmentation, and impact. It’s tough, elastic, and in many ways resembles a gigantic gummi bear. Fans of Mythbusters (or certain DIY railguns) will recognize the stuff. Water-based blocks made with natural gelatin can be easily made at home, but end up with a yellow-brown color and have a limited shelf life due to evaporation. Clear blocks exist that are oil-based and don’t dry out like the water-based ones. It’s one of these that is in the embedded animation [above].

Slow motion video capture is a natural companion to just about anything that you’d need ballistic gel for, and good thing — because the video captured what appears to be a diesel effect! The block is hit with a bullet, and as the bullet rapidly expands and dumps its energy into the gel, a cavity expands rapidly. During this process, some of the (oil-based) material in the cavity has been vaporized. After the expanded bullet exits (to the right of the gif above but easier to see in the video below), the cavity in the block begins to collapse. The resulting pressure increase appears to ignite the vaporized material, which explodes with a flash followed by some exhaust.

How cool is that?