Useing a balloon for a oxyhydrogen explosive?

I had the same Idea OT(Hiss. neutral mix) using acetylene for obvious reasons
as a rifle target using tracers.Obviously the practice would have to be limited to winter around here but I dont think it illegal,after all binary explosives are sold for the same purposes but at exorbitant $.A good size party balloon makes a hell of a bang.Should one be unfortunate enough to be holding said balloon and it detonated your eardrums are at serious peril of being perforated.Maybe Kewl but sounds like fun to me

[Edited on 28-1-2011 by grndpndr]

Quote: Originally posted by crazedguy

So I came up with the idea that you could put a balloon on a water bottle and capture the gases made by electrolysis.

Quote: Originally posted by grndpndr

'Lunatiks of Birmingham' seems appropriate.Cast Iron coffin! How many pallbearers?!LOL

Quote: Originally posted by hissingnoise

Marking the valves of an oxyacetylene torch to give a neutral flame, filling a balloon or large plastic bag with the ensuing mixture and igniting it remotely would wake all the people unfortunate enough to be your neighbours . . . What fun?

Quote: Originally posted by hissingnoise

Marking the valves of an oxyacetylene torch to give a neutral flame, filling a balloon or large plastic bag with the ensuing mixture and igniting it remotely would wake all the people unfortunate enough to be your neighbours . . . What fun?

It's much easier to use volume measurements to achieve a stoichiometric ratio of gas in the balloon. Let's see, for acetylene it would be...

2C₂H₂ + 5O₂ -> 4CO₂ + 2H₂O

5molO₂/7mol*100% = 71.4% O₂
2molC₂H₂/7mol*100% = 28.6% C₂H₂

So figure 70/30 for a decent approximation.

Assuming a large 20cm diameter spherical party balloon, that gives:

V_total = 4/3*pi*r³
V_total = 4/3*pi*(10cm)³
V_total = 4.2*10³cm³

We would obviously add the acetylene first, as it is the smaller fraction, then add the oxygen to mix the oxidizer and fuel effectively. So, the radius of the balloon after adding the correct quantity of fuel would be:

r_fuel = (3*(V*0.3)/4*pi)^1/3
r_fuel = (3*((4.2*10³cm³*0.3)/4*pi)^1/3
r_fuel = 6.7cm

So fill the balloon to d = (6.7*2) = 13.4cm with acetylene, then add oxygen until the diameter reaches 20cm. Very simple, and a hell of a lot easier than trying to snuff out a torch flame and fill the balloon with mixed gases.

EDIT:

acetylene by its lonesome

Quote: Originally posted by grndpndr

KISS

If you were working with a repeatable spereical shape all this would be relavent.Balloons are not a reliable means to measure volume or ratios by thier circumference since there not speres nor are they of a repeatable shape are they?!

So it stands to reason if you dont have a consistent shape how can you calculate volume by simply measuring circumference of an inconsistent shape then assuming volume equates to a sphere which a balloon is not?Its a built in inconsistency that throws the entire premise of kilter

Given those facts it seems a more reliable way to have a correct ratio of gases is by filling the balloon with a known mixture.The only really precise method I can think of to verify volume of an irregular shape is by displacement or actually measuring the amount of gas used in filling the balloon.

Finally, Theres really no need to be so thin skinned/hostile towards those with differeing opinions.If the acronym KISS upset you that would be your cross to bear.It wasnt addressed at you it was simply a generalization.If I can arrive at the same or better results by a simpler method Ill do so.If that offends your scientific sensibilities thats unfortunate for you.You are more than welcome to think of me as a caveman.Not unflattering at all given our ancestor's adaptability,capacity to survive in an infinetly hostile enviroment.

Back to the topic at hand as Im sure many of you know small disposable tanks of oxygen and mapp gas (methyacetylene/propadiene,C4H10) are available at any hardware store
worth the name and it might be a respectable substitute for acetylene although what the effect of the excess hydrogen would have I leave to the more learned among you.

Whether or not std propane torch fittings work on the 02 or MAPP gas I dont know but I would doubt thier compatibility w/propane torch's causing extra $ outlays.Still in the vien of fun
as a rifle target using tracers from .22lr to a high power mil caliber or even improvised homemade tracers for which there are volumes of info it still sounds FUN despite....

Methyl acetylene and propadiene (C₃H₄, they are structural isomers) MAPP blends are no longer readily available in most areas of the world. They have been replaced by a similar product which is comprised of ~99.5% propylene (C₃H₆. Not quite as energetic, but more so than propane.

"I though he was amply forewarned."

"For fools rush in where angles fear to tread."

Nobody should fill garbage bags or airbeds with fuel gas / oxygen or air mixtures and ignite them.
You will have tens or even hundreds of litres of gas and the explosion will be huge and could be dangerous and might be illegal.
If you live in a country district and go for five litres or so in a balloon, it will make a safe explosion that could be mistaken for a backfire. Legally it will probably fall into a grey area or may even be legal. In the UK small gas explosions in balloons are a mainstay of chemical demonstrations so I reckon they are legal.
Really it is a backfire but not from a car!
Do some research, plan out what you are going to do and stick to the plan.
If it goes wrong, give up the experiment and start again.
I have done a lot of dangerous chemistry and never had a serious accident but I started off handling safe chemicals and developed a good technique.
Do it on a small scale and make it bigger if you need to and rehearse things. You do not want to do your first gas explosion in front of an audience.

Quote: Originally posted by SB15

Quote: Ill let your assertion that approx 10% variation in volume "is pretty flippant consisent [sic] in your world" speak for itself. "inconsistent methods have no place on a scientific forum" I'm sorry, but if this is your only response to my comments, and you still believe that marking the valves on a torch will get you even close to <10% experimental error, then you are clearly too stupid to be participating in this discussion. Move on. Quote: If You have determined a repeatable ,simple method of filling a balloon or plastic bag with a stoichiometric gas mix using commonly available materials thats [sic] more accurate that a neutral flame and marked valves lets hear it!(then prove it)Then Ill be dazzled by your brilliance and baffled by your bullshit.Till then... It's not rocket science. 2 valves, a trapped volume of known value, a pressure gauge, and Boyle's law are all you need. If you can't figure it out from that description, you have no business playing around with such sensitive and powerful gas mixtures. [Edited on 1-31-2011 by SB15]

Quote: Originally posted by crazedguy

You have been on this forum for less than a month and have less than 20 post, maybe try to be a little more reasonable and not act like a troll.

The explosion blasted out the win dows of two homes

Quote: Originally posted by SB15

Quote: Originally posted by crazedguy   You have been on this forum for less than a month and have less than 20 post, maybe try to be a little more reasonable and not act like a troll. Are you one of those individuals who believes that post count and longevity on a forum determine one's level of knowledge? [/url]

Woohoo, you two big darlings must really fancy each other to get all hissy like this!

Quote: Originally posted by The WiZard is In

Clearwater Times .Tuesday July 6, 2004 .‎ St. Petersburg Times - Jul 6, 2004 LARGO — The explosion blasted out the windows of two homes. ... at a neighborhood Fourth of July party mixed oxygen and acetylene in a plastic garbage bag, ... http://tinyurl.com/4ezyrua Found it. Strange-Looking Car Leads To Explosives Charges Balloon Filled With Acetylene Bound For Super Bowl Party http://www.thedenverchannel.co.../6790966/detail.html I remember an explosion in a Manhattan, NY welding supply store. Don't be knowing if it was caused by leaking acetylene or propane or ?? The store fronted on 52nd St between 10th and 11th avenue, the roll down steel front gate looked like it had been kicked by Paul Bunion. The rear of the building facing 54st backed up on to a small parking lot. One of my fellow employees had bought a new car and he a two other coworker were looking at. They hadn't gotten twenty feet away - back to work when the rear brick wall of the welding store fell on his brand new car. One store employee suffered a broken leg. After the accident they stored all of their tanks outside.

Here's a crude 5 minute MS Paint rendering of what it would look like. Calculations would need to be done to account for the extra volume of the connecting fittings. I would also add a quick connect fitting to allow the metering setup to be disconnected from the rest of the setup, as the exterior of the gauges are susceptible to blast overpressure.

Nothing is to scale BTW.

Quote: Originally posted by SB15

Again, welding setups are designed to supply a consistent supply of oxidizer and fuel when the gas is burning, and with zero pressure feedback into the system. You have provided nothing to suggest that stoichiometry is maintained when the flame is extinguished and backpressure is feeding into the torch head. Assuming this has no significant effect may not be wrong, but it's crude, unverified methodology. A shot in the dark, essentially.

I was just watching that second video again and noticed that at 0:34, there are plumes of thick black smoke pouring out of the cars parked in front of the yard. And it looks like it's coming from the windows of the cars.

The insides of the cars are on fire, yet there is a distinct lack of things on fire or broken around them.

INSURANCE JOB!

---------

Wizard, you are a strange and amusing man, as I have likely said before.

To put a rest to the oxy/acetylene torch debacle, one could simply try filling balloons with the torch out and then light the torch to see how the mix is combusting. Welders will look for a perfect mix based on the configuration of the cones and also how the flame behaves when put against something.

One method I've heard of guys using is to simply set the flame to rich to begin with, wave it over some metal, to deposit carbon, then raise the O2 content until it will burn off the carbon and back it down a little.

The are a number of variations on that, based on whether or not it will produce reducing or oxidizing results when something is heated in the flame.

Alternatively, watch the gauges as you add the balloon for an increase in the pressure the second stage reads. Or fill a none elastic container and then push the gas into the balloon.

Short of hooking your source or generator up to a gas chromatograph, you're not getting much better.

With acetylene being so unstable under pressure, you are likely going to get more exciting results from treating it to the loving care of a high pressure shock wave. Precisely how it behaves, and how filling balloons affects the back pressure, I must admit, has never crossed my mind as a particularly important issue as I get my card out to pay for another cylinder of the two.

When a roughly ideal mix will do the things demonstrated in the video above, I fail to see why a number of you are so concerned over the remaining few percent.

I'm not even sure why you'd really want to be doing that in the first place.

If you want to make a loud bang or blow something up, there are vastly superior alternatives. You'll never match the energy density of a solid explosive using these gas mixes. And why do you want to blow something up? Unless you're mining, I don't see much use to that. The irony being, they use fairly simple stuff for blasting.

So... I don't get it.

[Edited on 2-2-2011 by peach]

Im sorry best electrodes for producing what (gas)?I missed that.
And a few other points.

FWIW i thought the discussion after advising we(SB/Myself) tone it down a bit far more productive.I think everyone had good points particularly safety.I know these things are very dangerous Im only proposing a 1-2 liter balloon size as a target.Still very unpleasant to have detonate next to you quite possibly perforating an eardrum/causing burns if close enough.
Similar to a primary in many ways except I dont think the gas mix will vaporize a couple fingers/hand.Still NOT to be taken lightly and not yet something ive tried but seriously considered.
If you have looked at the cost of the commercial binary tgts you might understand my interest.

In retrospect likely a bad Idea.

In a perfect world w/adequate funds a system could be designed
that operated remotely OT fitting the balloons to nipples and filling them with the appropriate gas mix.Of course someone would shoot a hole in a gas line w/o steel plate protection

Many of you seen test videos of high pressure cylinder penetrate a concrete block wall w/o detonation deflagration but By gas pressure alone the heavy cylinders are launched at amazing velocity/kinetic energy.If ignited a RP(Gas)C!

I have filled balloons using cylinders; just slip it over the nipple, part fill the balloon with hydrogen, pinch the neck and slip it off the nipple, slip on to the second nipple and add a shot of oxygen. Then slip it off and tie the neck.
Optimum ratio is somewhere around 2:1 hydrogen to oxygen but as anyone who has popped hydrogen in a test tube will know it is not critical.
You can fill a balloon from a welder as well. Just slip it over the end and add some acetylene, then put a shot of oxygen in, slip it off and tie the neck.
Ratios are not critical in gas explosions, really you can judge it by eye with a bit of experience.
As long as you stick to balloons and use a modicum of care and common sense thay are noisy but very safe.
If you start filling up garbage bags, plastic or glass bottles or caravans
You are going to be one sorry maimed or even dead little bunny!

Zinc/HCI reaction?
Zinc from an alkaline battery casing/acid from Hardware.
Used this to fill balloons as lighter than air as a boy.Hindenburg
minus the aluminized airplane dope covering

Quote: Originally posted by crazedguy

The gas I want to produce is hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis of water.

This is demonstrated in GCSE (16 y/o) level chemistry in the UK using a Hofmann Voltameter <----- This is August Wilhelm von Hofmann from the 19th Century, not Albert (the LSD guy) from the 20th.

The apparatus is simply two burettes standing upside down. There is a tiny platinum electrode in what would normally be the tops of the burettes, but that are now the bottoms (other electrodes can be used, and you can also buy short lengths of platinum wire or mesh cheaper than you'd think; it only has to be a tiny piece, not a $3k engagement ring).

It's filled with distilled water, which won't conduct on it's own. A tiny amount of acid is added to make it conduct. The water splits and you get hydrogen in one burette and oxygen in the other.

The demonstration uses the Hofmann apparatus, with the two marked burettes, so the teacher can show very graphically, and with measurements from the burettes, that there is twice as much gas in one than in the other, as evidence that one is filling with hydrogen and the other with oxygen as a result of the H2O splitting.

Samples of the gases will then be taken by sticking a test tube over the top, opening the tap to collect some, and trying to ignite the result in the test tubes.

One will do nothing, but will reignite a blown out splint. The other will produce the infamous 'squeaky pop', but not relight the blown out splint.

This is an excellent method of demonstrating it because it shows the results in different formats. Some people learn by tactile, visual results, yet are poor at the theory, others are incapable of visualising something but are much stronger with numbers. Combining the two universally gives better results. Having an engineer who can both use SolidWorks models, but appreciates the finer details of how something is going to behave in the complex world of reality. Those perfect combinations don't exist, so engineering teams are used instead, and meeting rooms full of biscuits, tea and whiteboards; and the project leader can then include the word 'synergy' in their reports. The same is true of pretty much all science projects; e.g. google data mining / this forum.



The electrolysis method is scaled up in Brown's gas (oxyhydrogen) generators.

These are more commonly used by jewellers, who want a very clean flame and to be able to simply fill the thing with water and switch it on and off to get the gas on demand. Rather than having big, dangerous, expensive cylinders hanging around their workshop. Jewellers tend to use very small torches, because the rings and necklaces are so tiny. Some of the torches actually use syringe blades as the nozzles, to get a tiny, tiny, invisible flame. The generators for those aren't much bigger than a lunch box and can go on the desk.

They come on a number of sizes and numerous different models. RioGrande is a very famous, and huge, supplier of the jewellery industry. They have some of the generators in their catalogue, along with a billion other things related to making shiny, expensive stuff.

People who work with materials that need to be extremely pure like hydrogen fuelled flames, as there is no carbon involved, which will embrittle some metals, make jewellery look messy and weaken some glass work.

QuickFit produce some of the best lab glass available. I have spoken with them a few times and have a hand written note from them beside me now, along with a free wash bottle and some details of how they produce the glass. They use natural gas and oxygen torches, and natural gas annealing ovens.

There are generators big enough to run a big welding torch. However, I have not once seen a gas welder actually using one (who wasn't trying to sell it). There is a video knocking around of a guy demonstrating larger scale brazing with one, but he makes a somewhat odd claim about the flame "adjusting it's own temperature" depending on what it's hitting, to the extent that he implies (if I remember correctly) that it wouldn't burn your skin if pointed directly at it (which he doesn't do). What he may be seeing is that the generator can't produce enough of the gas to heat large work pieces, so they are cooler than the flame temperature alone. This is a common mistake in electronics soldering as well, that you should use a low wattage iron for sensitive work. In reality, that means it takes longer to heat the part to the soldering temperature and the components end up roasting hot as you wait; and the heat conducts from the lead to the insides.

Gas welding and cutting is rarely used now when it's not heating something BIG. For example, gas cutting torches can cut metal over a foot thick. There are no plasma cutters or lasers available that can compete with that. Thermal (oxygen) lances can cut metal feet thick, and can also do cement based materials and clays.

Gas torches are still common around heavy industry, like shipbuilding. As they require no electricity or special optics, they are also used for rescue work and in remote locations where a plug socket isn't available. Thermal lances are used for heavy demolition and are sometimes used to open the plugs in iron foundries. They burn colder than acetylene, and don't produce a true flame, but don't rely on fuel evaporating or boiling out of cylinders, so they can have huge BTU ratings.

A side effect of cutting things that thick with gas is that the torches rip through cylinders. It is easier, and cheaper, to buy the cylinders rather than start generating the Brown's gas on demand.

As an example of the difference in power between electric (plasma / arc) and gas methods, ESAB will sell you a gas torch that can output around 80 to 90kW of heat, with a normal mains ring managing around 2 to 3kW before you run it into the Brown's gas generator and subsequently suffer losses. 80 to 90kW is three times what the grid fuse on my house can manage, ignoring all the internal wiring and breakers.

Acetylene torches burn at 3300C, 700C hotter than hydrogen torches. This means the work piece heats up a lot quicker.

There are only two higher temperature fuels known. Cyanogen at 4525C and Dicyanoacetylene 4990C. They produce such hot flames due to the massive amount of energy stored in the Carbon to Nitrogen triple bonds.

Both of them are highly toxic, entirely ruling them out in any realistic production environment.

Other gases used include MAPP and Propylene. Both burn colder than acetylene, but have some advantages in terms of handling and cost.

Plumbers use MAPP quite often, as it is burns hotter (warming the copper to it's soldering point quicker) than propane but can be bottled in little disposable cylinders. Acetylene can not. MAPP is also more expensive than propane, meaning you need to be used to working quickly and cleanly not to end up wasting money using it in the first place; e.g. not leaving the torch light whilst you do something else. MAPP smells like acetylene, but not quite as nice.

For disposable cylinders, as you'd get from Bernzomatic, oxygen comes in reds, propane in blues, MAPP in yellows. The gas is universally more expensive, quite a lot more, than it is to buy in refillable cylinders.

A number of people have built their own Brown's gas generators. You can find them by googling things like "DIY Brown's gas".

Reacting aluminium kitchen foil with concentrated NaOH or KOH will produce very large volumes of hydrogen very quickly.

I can envisage people trying to fill solid walled objects with acetylene over 15psi, and having it go off in their face. Oxygen enriched atmospheres will allow things to combust at massively reduced spark energies. Oil can combust INSIDE regulators and hoses when high pressure oxygen is added. Welders have even caught fire dusting their greasy overalls off with the oxygen from their torch. In the same way, pressurising a mixture of fuel gas and oxygen, by blowing it into none elastic container, is a bad, bad, bad idea. As another for instance, if you fill it cold, and then set it outside and get ready to do something, the heat from the sun hitting it could be enough raise the pressure and set it off.

The simplest method to get the largest bang realistically possible from a gas mixture is acetylene mixed with oxygen, into a balloon.

[Edited on 4-2-2011 by peach]

I remember when researching HHO cells that you could get a flame using hydrogen that was hotter than an acetylene/oxygen flame. I forgot the name. I don't mean hydrogen/oxygen. They passed the hydrogen through an arc, which would rip apart the molecule or something, and on the other side of the arc it would recombine and it is this recombining of the molecules that generates tons of heat.

EDIT: it's called "Atomic hydrogen welding"

[Edited on 4-2-2011 by gnitseretni]

Quote: Originally posted by peach

The LHC is the highest energy particle accelerator on earth. [Edited on 4-2-2011 by peach]

Quote: Originally posted by peach

There are also plasma welders, which are a blend between a plasma cutter and a TIG set. Thermal Arc sell them. [Edited on 4-2-2011 by peach]

Quote: Originally posted by The WiZard is In

Quote: Originally posted by peach   The LHC is the highest energy particle accelerator on earth. [Edited on 4-2-2011 by peach] Actually. For a lot less money I have found that by sucking cement dust through the plastic hose on my shop vac I can generate voltages high enough to create the elusive Higg's Boson. I am storing them as generated in a Bose-Einstein Condensate in the back of my freezer. Couple of dozen more and a Nobel Prize is mine for the asking.

Quote: Originally posted by peach

Atomic hydrogen welding That's not combustion welding, it's more akin to an arc method.

Quote: Originally posted by watson.fawkes

So you're actual burning 2 H + O2 rather than H2 + O2.

If the welder has a current limit built into it (and it should do, given the likely hood of it happening), it should be able to withstand being shorted.

MIG welders are constant voltage supplies, whereas TIG are constant current.

The newer generations of computer processors use absolutely staggering amounts of current. It's amazing when you think about it, that they contain such super precise, microscopic, delicate elements, yet have what is not far off a welder attached to them. They are all powered by switch mode supplies. Switch modes are incredible compared to linear supplies, in terms of their space, weight and power saving. Linear supplies are the weapon of choice for extremely precise and quiet output. Walt Jung is famous for designing a linear regulator that produces less noise in it's output than a battery - the so called 'Super Regulator', favoured by audiophiles, and much discussed at diyAudio.

Switch mode supplies also require someone who has a high level of ability with electronics to design them to take a universal input, to regulate under all conditions, feature low noise in the output and emit little RF noise. This makes small production runs of them expensive, particularly if the output doesn't adhere to one of the standards used with semiconductors (for which there are premade controllers and layouts). Since computer PSU's are churned out by the million and go obsolete quickly, you can find them for next to nothing, or in bins.

The way they are built is far more technically complex than a linear regulator, making it less of a simple task to regulate the output voltage and current. Whether or not that's an issue in your experiment is another thing. Most bits of chemistry aren't bothered by a bit of electrical noise from a switch mode supply, and you can dump voltage or limit current using brute force resistance if need be; not particularly pretty or compact, but effective.

As MIG welders are relatively low voltage devices, it won't take a lot of resistance in their way to reduce the current. But the resistor will get hot. I have seen people using some very unique methods of controlling when building DIY plasma cutters.

The amount of current flowing will also depend on how much acid you use in the water. You could simply start with pure water, and add acid until you're happy with the current and rate of evolution.

Since I was on my way down to recharge my cup of coffee, I thought I'd take a photo of some linear supplies I have. These are rated at 6Vdc and 30amps each. Something that should be immediately apparent is that they are big compared to a computer PSU (they're about a sack of cement in weight each), and it's not due to them using older technology, but an inherent side effect of how they regulate the output;



Because the supplies filter mains frequency electricity, they need very large capacitors


SM power supplies use very high frequencies, and the magnetic field from an inductor is proportional to the frequency of the current through it, so they can use tiny magnetics. These mains frequency ones, however, have to use big lumps of iron in the transformer. The rest of the supply is made up from pass transistors mounted to heat sinks. The transistors are functioning like variable resistors, and simply dump unwanted voltage across themselves. This makes them get very hot. Even if you're not bothered about the wasted electricity, you need to be bothered about the heat. Without the big heat sinks, the transistors would cook themselves almost instantly. Switch mode supplies don't 'dump' unwanted voltage or current, they generate it on demand. There was a big boom in welding when inverters, which are switch mode, came out, and you could suddenly have really high current supplies in something you could actually move without a crane. The fancy ones from ESAB, Lincoln, Miller and Thermal Arc with all the digital controls on the front are a result of someone putting a lot of effort into designing the switch mode supply. It is basically a mini power station, rebuilding the power and allowing you to shape into different waveforms, currents, voltages, frequencies, pulse widths, durations and all the other colours of the rainbow - they're high output waveform generations more than power supplies, in my opinion


[Edited on 5-2-2011 by peach]

There are endless guides about wiring computer PSU's up to use them as fixed voltage supplies, so I won't explain it here. Google for 'lab (or bench or DIY) supply computer PSU'. It's as complex as gather the wiring spools together into a group and finding the one the PSU uses as a 'wake up' signal when the button is pushed on the front.

AC TIG sets certainly are appealing but, having bought one, I discovered the amount of things I wanted to weld that needed the AC simply wasn't enough to justify the cost of having AC on it. Most people never encounter magnesium in welding, so that leaves aluminium. And quite a lot of things made from aluminium can be made from steels, just using less of it.

More of the things I'm interested in are stainless, which wants DC. And a DC only set is a lot cheaper.

If you need to fix aluminium, and can't spend out on an AC set, there are hard soldering / brazing kits you can get with special fluxes that will let you do it with gas torches. Something that doesn't work with normal rods and torches.

Failing that, break out the pop riveter. Riveting is still a good idea on long welds. The Liberty / Victory ships of WW2 used an entirely welded hull. Which then tore open in the sea. The rivets where put back after enough of them sank.

[Edited on 6-2-2011 by peach]

Good Stuff, Thanks!

The Titanic disaster may not have been so disaterous(smaller open sea hull failure,longer time afloat) had the steel not suffered the same embrittlement(poor quality steel/riveted hull).Of course the iceberg had some effect.

[Edited on 6-2-2011 by grndpndr]

Quote: Originally posted by peach

Quote: Originally posted by watson.fawkes   So you're actual burning 2 H + O2 rather than H2 + O2. As I understand it, oxygen isn't part of the equation. The heat comes from the atomic hydrogen recombining to H2.

Quote: Originally posted by grndpndr

Good Stuff, Thanks! The Titanic disaster may not have been so disaterous(smaller open sea hull failure,longer time afloat) had the steel not suffered the same embrittlement(poor quality steel/riveted hull).Of course the iceberg had some effect. [Edited on 6-2-2011 by grndpndr]

I seem to remember the titanic also had another problem in that the interior walls, that were supposed to seal off the flooded sections, didn't run continuously up through her.

When one section flooded badly enough, the water would rise up a few decks and spill over into the next section. This was offset by the bilge and trimming pumps shifting the water, but those pumps aren't designed to prevent gross flooding.

It pains me to say it, but the Titanic was registered to the port of Liverpool and had Liverpool on the hull. That same port is within walking distance of my house and I routinely drive past the shipyards. One of my friends in school did his apprenticeship at the Cammell Laird yard and I get the gas for science experiments from the suppliers of the local shipyards. A substantial number of the naval vessels were built at Lairds; aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers...

I will try to dodge some embarrassment by stating that the Titanic was actually built in Belfast, in Ireland, and set sail from Southampton. The three chief designers were staff at the Harland and Wolff yard in Belfast - so I'm pointing fingers for the blame at them!

I think there were 16 wall sections in total. Knowing what the ship was designed for, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in it's design at least one person had said to the yard, "We can't have those big steel walls on the upper decks, they look terrible!"

Liverpool is the closest dock to Ireland, and I routinely see tanker trucks of Guinness going by. In fact, someone wrote to the local paper complaining about the noise. The ship's construction was founded in Liverpool, hence it being her port of register.

As with all accidents, one of the positive outcomes is being aware of how significant a previously overlooked problem can be in preventing a recurrence.

[Edited on 6-2-2011 by peach]

Quote: Originally posted by crazedguy

So I came up with the idea that you could put a balloon on a water bottle and capture the gases made by electrolysis. The point of this would be to either tape a fuse to the balloon which would provide a sufficient bang, but I think it may be possible to get a better bang by strapping a small flash powder fire cracker to it. So the question is would this provide better bang by setting it off with a small flash powder bomb would that get a full detonation, or would it be the same as just using a fuse? I know that by adding 1 gram flash to set it off will be slightly louder but would it achieve full detonation. (1 gram-ish) Would a balloon full of oxyhydrogen float?