Welcome to Brainstuff from house Stuff Works dot com, where smart happens brought to you by Pisa. We all have things we like to think about. Online fraud shouldn't be one of them, because with every purchase, Pisa prevents, detects, and resolves online fraud safe Secure Pisa. Hi, Am Marshall, Brain with today's question. How does a gun silencer work? It's amazing that anything is able to silence a gun, but gun silencers actually work on a very simple principle.
Imagine a balloon. If you pop a balloon with a pin, it will make a loud noise, But if you were to untie the end of the balloon and let the air out slowly, it makes very little noise. This is the basic idea behind a gun silencer. To fire a bullet from a gun, gunpowder is ignited behind the bullet. The gunpowder creates a high pressure pulse of hot gas. The pressure of the gas forces the bullet down the barrel of the gun. When the bullet exits the end
of the barrel, it is like uncorking a bottle. The pressure behind the bullet is immense, however, on the order of three thousand pounds per square inch, so the pop that a gun makes as it's uncorked is extremely loud. A silencer screws onto the end of the barrel and has a huge volume compared to the barrel, twenty or thirty times greater. With the silencer in place, the pressure rise gas behind the bullet has a big space to expand into, so the pressure of the hot gas falls significantly.
When the bullet finally exits through the hole in the silencer, The pressure being uncorked is much much lower, perhaps sixty p s i. Therefore, the sound of the gun firing is much softer. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com.