i need to know

[zacsilverback]

how much wait does it take to detonate a land mine

what kind of metal are they made of

[deleted-71417]

Hi,

I do not think your questions are such that they can be directly answered. There are a large number of different mine types and designs. Many modern mines are made mostly of plastic to avoid detection by metal detectors. I saw one Wikipedia reference that said some mines deployed in the Falklands war are not detonated by a penguin stepping on them but are by a human. That probably suggests that a weight of 30 to 90 pounds is required to trigger them, as a guess. Here ia an interesting article on the design of World War 2 land mines:

http://books.google.com/books?id=2ykDAA ... 941&f=true

You should note that landmines may have multiple triggers of several types, including pressure plates, tripwires, tilt detectors, or magnetic field detectors. If you want to know more you will have to try to find detailed specifications for specific mine designs, which may not be easy as they may be classified as military secrets by the countries that manufacture them.

If you are seriously interested in this area you may want to look into the patent literature. Here is a list of US patents in the last 35 years that reference landmine(you can see the full text of the patent by clicking on the underlined title of interest):

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Pars ... ine&d=PTXT

On a side note you should probably check whether this project is acceptable for entry in your science fair - I doubt that experiments involving explosives will be permitted, and I don’t know what kind of experiment you could do in this area.

Good luck!

Barrett Tomlinson