WORCESTER, Mass. - The Explosion Protection Engineering Program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute is demonstrating how dangerous a sudden blast can be at home or on the job.

Students and faculty are researching why these explosions happen and how to prevent them using a controlled environment to simulate a flammable liquid spill at a scale you might see in your home or garage.

Student Andrew Goetz said it doesn’t take much to cause this sort of reaction.

“We put about a Gatorade cap worth of fuel inside of the confined compartment and then had nothing more than a gas grill igniter, that was the ignition source,” Goetz said. “So, kind of highlighting how big of an explosion you can have from a very small amount of fuel.”

WPI’s program is the first master’s degree program of its kind in the nation, and students like Hannah Murray said there’s a growing need for their research as new energy sources present new risks.

“Lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles, bicycles, a lot of our devices, everyone is carrying a lithium ion battery with them in their cell phone, and as we see, hydrogen energy is being talked about as well, nuclear power plants, the cooling sources, they’re talking about different coolants around the reactor instead of water,” Murray said. “In general, the electrical grid is changing from how we’ve known it.”

And instructors in the department bring unique backgrounds to the lab - Jagannath Jayachandran previously worked in aerospace engineering, which helps students understand how their work could help industries make key decisions to increase safety.

“What we try to do in aerospace engineering is to burn faster, and we want to burn faster, we want to fly faster, extract as much energy out of fuel cells as fast as possible,” Jayachandran said. “This is the other end, right? If we were to have an accident happen, how can we prevent the damage from the accident, or how can we prevent the accident from happening at all?”