Sciencemadness Discussion Board - chapati peroxide?

chapati peroxide?

Aurum - 15-1-2007 at 06:00

To quote the BBC,

"The prosecutor told how six bombs were made using a mix of liquid hydrogen peroxide, chapati flour, acetone and acid. "

The full article is here

How does chapati flour feature in this?

YT2095 - 15-1-2007 at 06:09

I normaly add Chili powder when I want to spice my chapatis up

I think you`ll find it`s probably used as a binding agent of some sort, Afterwards, or maybe for a fuel/air effect?

hashashan - 16-1-2007 at 07:10

Actually i do believe that the explosive was the H2O2 and not the flour, the flour must of been the plasticizer.
H2O2 is explosive at concentrations above 70%, the peculiar thing is that it shoud of ignite the flour at such concentration on contact.
anyone has an idea?

nitro-genes - 16-1-2007 at 12:33

Quote:

Originally posted by hashashan
H2O2 is explosive at concentrations above 70%, the peculiar thing is that it shoud of ignite the flour at such concentration on contact.

Not so sure about that, I've seen explosive compositions mentioned that used high concentrations of hydrogen peroxide (80-90%) and woodpulp as a fuel. These mixtures were said to be extremely sensitive to shock and catalysing impurities, but did gave incredibly high lead block expansions...

Seen that they used acetone and acidic conditions as well, I'm pretty sure though they made the only thing they know how to make properly, and that is TACP. And even that they managed to screw up, since none of their charges (fortunately) managed to detonate!

Sauron - 16-1-2007 at 13:00

I think maybe next time I go for ethnic food I will order some peroxide on my vindaloo or samosa, or tandoori.

Chris The Great - 16-1-2007 at 15:42

The fact the AP was full of flour explains why the bombs failed to explode. What a bunch of morons.

Rosco Bodine - 16-1-2007 at 16:09

six butt uglies all in a row ......

six chambers in a .44 revolver ....

fortuitous coincidence , or providence ?

Just empty the .44 , jihad this ...you shitheads !

Call it fixing late what problems
neglected birth control provided .....
and hollow point darwin awards
keep 'em from breeding more every time .

Sauron - 16-1-2007 at 18:45

I'm shocked at such cynicism!

ROTFL!

Rosco Bodine - 16-1-2007 at 20:03

Yeah I understand those jihadi jerks spoiled a
lot of the new years celebration in Thailand .....
just goes to prove that whatever year it is ...
that where ever it is they are ,

it is " the year of the mutt "

Sauron - 16-1-2007 at 21:15

Well, except that the incident you are referring to was NOT the jihad jerks, but rather some flunkies or functionaries of the ousted prime minister Thaksin, expressing displeasure that the loss of their pork barrel. (Now there's a metaphor that the jihasists would not use.)

1. Small AN charges, albeit studded with nails and ball nearings
2. Locations that did not target toutists
3. Set off on Jan 31 when 90% of Bangkok's population is absent celebrating the NY upcountry

In short minimal damage to life and property. I think the average was 1 death per device. c.5 wounded per. Really amateur night.

No, not the jihadists who are not known for trying to respect human life.

FWIIW I think the bulk of the mayhem in Pattani, Yala and Narathivat provinces is also not jihadists but rather other parties who have their own agenda and are happy to let the jihadists, seperatists, et al take the blame. The southern Mosl;ems are if you will pardon the expression, the pigs in the middle, and frankly always have been.

A year or two ago the Ozzie-based Intl Conflict Group assessed the historical and contemporary backdrop of this situation and concluded there were only five groups with the resources required to be behind the major January 2004 incidents there.

The first two on their short list and mine own were the Thai Army and the Thai police.

I still regard the other three (insurgent seperatists groups all) as dark horses.

If you are interested in their white paper I will send it to you. Or post it here. Or put it up on MadHatter, whatever is more appropriate.

[Edited on 17-1-2007 by Sauron]

Boomer - 17-1-2007 at 06:17

I had thought it was a kilo TATP each, with flour added for an FEA effect.

Since there was NO effect at all, and since it is impossible to get that out of TATP, no matter how brainless the ragheads are, they really must have mixed the peroxide, acetone, acid and flour all together, with a sparkler stuck in.

Probably lost Osama's instructions, and used the terrorist handbook instead...

And no, high conc H2O2 does not ignite flour on contact, instead it gels it, giving a detonable dough which decomposes within a day while releasing oxygen. Blasting performance is comparable to gelatine dynamite, plus the stuff is self-defusing. :cool:

hashashan - 17-1-2007 at 06:51

so maybe thats what they did?
in our news-papers it was written that the charges were detonated by the police after the incident.
i just remember reading that H2O2 in very high concentraitions ignite any organic matter it comes in contact with. but i might be wrong... sorry if im wrong

YT2095 - 17-1-2007 at 08:01

thinking about it, if the flour was added through the reaction to make a dough, the FAE idea wouldn`t work, the flour would need to be in powder form outside the explosive to work that way.

I rem watching a docu on this, 2 pianos identical, one with plain dynamite inside the other with plain dynamite and half bag of flour, needless to say, they both blew up but the one with the flour made much more mess by far.

also, IIRC, isn`t the OB in TCAP a little fuel rich already?

[Edited on 17-1-2007 by YT2095]

MargaretThatcher - 17-1-2007 at 11:35

The idea was to stage a symbolic suicide bombing. They wished to prove that they had the materials and know how to do it, but did not.

neutrino - 17-1-2007 at 15:45

Conc. H2O2 + organics do usually react, but not with fire. I saw a video some time ago where highly concentrated H2O2 was poured on a veriety of organics. The only one that caught fire, if memory serves, was leather. The others just discolored.

Actually, an FAE made with AP might be feasible. AP is a peculiar molecule in that its explosion is entropy-driven, i.e. the molecules just fall apart. Little heat is produced. I remember reading about a chemistry demo where AP is detonated on a piece of paper and the paper is left uncharred.

The flour would be pushed around by the explosion and dispersed into a fine cloud. Of course, once the exploding AP disperses the flour, the cloud of flour must be ignited by some flame source. These guys probably forgot about that part.

Then again, there are other problems with this scheme. The gases from the exploded AP would decrease the amount of oxygen available to the flour particles and might prevent the FAE from causing much of an explosion, if it ignited at all. Also, the distribution of flour particles would be non-uniform and thus sub-optimal.

It seems like an AP-based FAE might be feasible, but it would be hard to do right.

Sauron - 17-1-2007 at 16:01

So much for the exploding Pilsbury Doughboy.

[Edited on 18-1-2007 by Sauron]

nitro-genes - 17-1-2007 at 17:13

It's funny, I was just having some discussion about FAE's with someone on u2u...

Like neutrino said as well, no single explosive (except maybe for strong +OB explosives) will probably work anyway, unless you add some longer burning particles, that aren't consumed in the reactionzone of the explosive itself. Like coarse aluminium or magnesium powder for example. Even 25 grams of PETN/Pib put under a 1 liter bottle of gasoline did not result in ignition of the fuel cloud to my surprise, whereas adding some extra aluminium powder does result in ignition. This is only slow burning though without any actual blastwave, which makes it ideal for imitating large explosions in movies...

A true FAE type device is much different from a simple dispersed fuel deflageration event. The first HE charge (C4 for example) disperses the fuel after which a second HE charge is used to detonate instead of simply igniting the fuel cloud, resulting in extremely high overpressures over a large area. Depending on the fuel, there is only a 100 ms timeframe maximum in which the fuel/air cloud will be able to detonate, making it difficult to make a FAE without EBW firing or some reliable high-speed-fuse delay...
So this cannot be done with a single charge anyway, with the possible exeption of extremely large charges, or in heavily confined spaces, for which the fuel/air cloud may be able to selfconfine enough to make DDT upon ignition...

hashashan - 18-1-2007 at 08:37

Quote:

Originally posted by Boomer

And no, high conc H2O2 does not ignite flour on contact, instead it gels it, giving a detonable dough which decomposes within a day while releasing oxygen. Blasting performance is comparable to gelatine dynamite, plus the stuff is self-defusing. :cool:

dont you think that thats what they tried to do. and not FAE.
that just seems very logical. an H2O2 dynamite and thats it

Boomer - 19-1-2007 at 03:36

I thought about that too, but if the TATP was for the detonators only, why did they give themself away with "many empty peroxide bottles in the trash", it explicitely states they bought so much the supplier had to re-stock.

Added as a sensitizer to the main charges? OMG they read Axt's thread about the peroxide watergel, adding TATP because they only had 35% H2O2!

hashashan - 19-1-2007 at 07:37

I believe they distilled the 35% peroxide to a higher concentration. and that was their main charge, desetisized with the flour.
the TATP was the det.

Nixie - 21-1-2007 at 01:57

Quote:

Originally posted by Rosco Bodine
six butt uglies all in a row ......

six chambers in a .44 revolver ....

fortuitous coincidence , or providence ?

Just empty the .44 , jihad this ...you shitheads !

Call it fixing late what problems
neglected birth control provided .....
and hollow point darwin awards
keep 'em from breeding more every time .

I've become an official Rosco fan. Anyone else wanna join the club?

Birth control, and indeed, a directed handling of the human gene pool is necessary. Judging by these quotes by top biologists, eugenics is becoming mainstream and acceptable again (thank goodness!):

"I don't think one ought to bring a clearly disabled child into the world." --John Sulston, Nobel-Prize winning geneticist

"Those parents who enhance their children, then their children are going to be the ones who dominate the world." --James Watson, Nobel-Prize winner, co-discoverer of DNA structure, former head of Human Genome Project

Quote:

Originally posted by Rosco Bodine
Yeah I understand those jihadi jerks spoiled a lot of the new years celebration in Thailand .....

Hmm... my most recent ex was Thai. I'm surprised she never brought it up. Must be that she's one of them Thai jihadists... I better give a call to the Mounties

Actually, I did have an islamist gf once, some indonesian... but that won't happen again. The more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that it's a militant religion and fundamentalist or not, they're all fucked to a degree. All religions are evil, but this has got to be the worst when you mutliply the number of followers with the danger of the teachings.

Quote:

Originally posted by nitro-genes
The first HE charge (C4 for example) disperses the fuel after which a second HE charge is used to detonate instead of simply igniting the fuel cloud, resulting in extremely high overpressures over a large area. Depending on the fuel, there is only a 100 ms timeframe maximum in which the fuel/air cloud will be able to detonate, making it difficult to make a FAE without EBW firing or some reliable high-speed-fuse delay...

So how do you protect the second charge from the initial blast? In 100 ms, the primary blast would reach quite a distance.

[Edited on 21-1-2007 by Nixie]

Sauron - 21-1-2007 at 03:03

Except, @Nixie, that it was not jihadists who spoiled the NY celebrations in Bangkok, and there are no Thai jihadists to speak of.

Neither JI nor AQ has gotten a toehold here, Thai Moslems are a small minority (6%) in a Buddhist country of 65 millions, and only a tiny number in three poor provinces on the southern frontier with Malaysia present any problem at all.

Now that the PM has been ousted, by the Monarchy, the southern problems are expected to simmer back down as the PM was the irritating factor. Not religion. Not radicalism. Certainly not foreign pan-Islamist bullshit from that Yemeni upstart OBL.

nitro-genes - 21-1-2007 at 10:05

Quote:

Originally posted by Nixie
So how do you protect the second charge from the initial blast? In 100 ms, the primary blast would reach quite a distance.

For insensitive explosives there is only a small distance for which sympathetic detonation will take place. The overpressure drops with a 3th power with increasing distances from the explosives. I'm quite sure that putting as less as 30 cm of distance between two 50 grams charges of an insensitive HE, like TNT or C4 wouldn't result in detonation of the second charge. For really insensitive AN based explosives, this would probably only be a few centimeters. Damage to the second charge can be overcome by leaving the second charge unconfined, (no shrapnel to damage second charge) and heavily confine the second charge to resit blast damage from the first...

[Edited on 21-1-2007 by nitro-genes]

Nixie - 21-1-2007 at 19:59

Well, the thing is there still has to be a detonator on the second charge. The question is how you protect that sensitive primary.

Boomer - 22-1-2007 at 03:50

EBWs.
THIS is the reason to use them, not the timing. 100 ms with better than 1% accuracy can be had with home made Xmass bulb detonators. You just have to overdrive them hard (100 x rated voltage = 10.000 x rated power, gets them going in 10 µs). Self made EBWs have jitter in the 1µs range, commecrial types around 125ns, and mil types probably 50ns or better, if Uncle Sam did his homework and spent tax dollars well.

Plus I suppose the two charges part before the first disperses the fuel cloud. To be in the cloud, the blast (and fuel) has to go past the second charge before it dets. Or it lags behind the first, then just enters the cloud from above before triggering (assuming airborne systems attacking ground structures). This way not much energy is lost in a detonation upwards. Better dont ask me.

nitro-genes - 22-1-2007 at 09:06

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xCgNdZPKk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aBfOOo-n5k&mode=related&...

This is a nice movie clip concerning FAE that I got from someone else. The second video is a lot of bullshit MOAB fetishism, mainly the other camera angles on the FAE testings with the manequin were interesting!

Amazing how discussion boards are blamed for the distribution of information about energetic materials, while for really good demonstration video's of shaped charges, or FAE's you only have to turn on discovery channel....

Depending on the amount of fuel, the dispersed cloud radiates outward to cover many meters, so you could put the second charge at really large distances from the dispersing charge (like in the movieclip above). Moreover, the dispersing charge is surrounded by 100 times it's own weight of fuel, dampening the blastwave considerably...
Even a sensitive primary like LA needs to be hit with hammer fairly hard to explode, no way such a concentrated force could be delivered by a small charge, 50 grams or so, at several meters. The primary would be in a strong container anyway, making it virtually impossibe to make them detonate at the same time I think...

In the movieclip it seems they use about 5 liters of fuel, estimated 50 grams dispersing charge, and about 1.5 meters between the fuel+dispersing charge and the second charge...

[Edited on 22-1-2007 by nitro-genes]