Smash Lab

Designers and engineers face an almost impossible challenge -- to use truck bed liner paint, normally used to protect vehicles from scratches and knocks, to protect an entire building from a massive explosion.

There are nearly 3000 railway crossing accidents each year. With more extreme experimentation, the Smash Lab team tests an idea to use giant airbags on the front of a train to push cars safely out of the way.

The team uses CO2 fire extinguishers to stop the bad guy in a high-speed car chase. The system has to work fast, but car engines are hard to kill. They must find a way of targeting the cool gas each and every time, and then find ways of deploying it.

The team takes on its biggest challenge yet; to repurpose a new material called Blastwrap. Blastwrap is designed to absorb the energy from a bomb placed inside a public trashcan. Could it work to protect a Boeing 747 from an explosion?