I saw a show on the history channel about the Texas City disaster where a ship loaded with ammonium nitrate caught fire and eventually blew up. Some people at the time had thought that this fire would have just continued to burn without any explosion. This got me to thinking about all the explosive compounds that have been discovered over time. Undoubtably many people have been killed or injured by their latest discovery. On a visit to the Air & Flight Museum in Seattle my brother and I took a tour of a Blackbird. The one at Boeing is not an SR71. It predates that model. But it's still the same basic plane, goes as fast, and uses the same engines. A fuel was developed for these planes that is very hard to ignite. This special fuel was used to cool the plane before it was burned (the fuel, that is), did not vaporize easily, and in fact would not ignite even when squirted into the superheated air inside the engines when the plane was at speed. The compression ratio inside the engine near top speed is 40 to 1 so you can imagine how hot that air was. A chemical was used to ignite the fuel. It combusted almost explosively whenever exposed to air. Each engine was equipped with a 16 oz. cannister of this stuff and a 1 oz. shot was used each time the engine ignited and each time the afterburners were lit off. I wonder if this nasty stuff was designed or found by accident? Do modern chemists have a pretty good idea what a theoretical compound will do? Can we tell if something is going to be stable before mixing it up? Just curious. It seems to me that with physics and chemistry so intertwined that we should have a pretty good idea what something should behave like before we make it. Not only that though. We should be able to look at a need and have some idea what kind of compound we need to fill that need. So just how well can we predict these things today? Thanks, Eric
- posted
18 years ago