In case you were wondering, in light of the nuclear power problems in Japan, why the prospect of water flashing to steam is an issue.
Steam explosion from a 1L sealed bottle, almost full of water. Don’t try this at home.
swans on tea
Just another SFN Blogs site
There’s a reason that ‘steam explosion’, or ‘steam explosion pulping’ is a technology used for ripping plant material apart to free the individual fibres.
The main difference with that technology and the blast in the picture is that in industry, they do not let all the debris out. And it’s possible to do it both in a continuous fashion, and in batch-operation.
Just saying that cool movies of explosions aren’t just destructive. Such knowledge can also be used in big industry to earn money and make the economy go. 🙂
LN2 in a pop bottle is also kinda cool. don’t stand too close though…
About 18 years ago, there was a bad lab accident at the U. of Alabama involving LN2 in a soda bottle. An undergraduate introductory physics lab was being supervised by a former grad student from Ghana. She had struggled as a grad student and had dropped out of the program shortly before the accident, but was allowed to continue as a lab TA for the remainder of that semester. She foolishly allowed a student to take some liquid nitrogen, and he put it into a Sprite bottle and capped it.
Glass bottle.
Some time later, the glass started to craze. Another student picked up the bottle and said something like “Hey, Pete, what are you going to do with this?”
Right then – bang. Cooked off in his hand, held at roughly eye level in the middle of the room. Several students were cut by flying glass. Blood spatter all over the walls and ceiling of the lab. Worst, the student who picked up the bottle suffered a deflated eye.
Numerous lessons here.