How Not to Do It: Liquid Nitrogen Tanks • Hacker News Board

Re: How Not to Do It: Liquid Nitrogen Tanks

#11

Post by pasbesoin » Wed, May 05, 2010, 6:35 AM UTC

btilly wrote: post #10

pasbesoin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That URL needs to lose a trailing hyphen: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...

I can't edit it any more. :-(

I didn't mean to seem pedantic. :-) More just for those who get a blank page (the response I was receiving -- no visible indication of 404, at least with Flash, etc. blocked) and assume the site's timing out.

Re: How Not to Do It: Liquid Nitrogen Tanks

#12

Post by viraptor » Wed, May 05, 2010, 7:10 AM UTC

Some time before, I attended a short course on handling the small/medium propane tanks. It's like with the nitrogen tank - it's relatively small, some people don't expect it to cause problems really -- but now I flinch every time I see someone kicking/rolling the bottle (way too common thing). In reality it could easily destroy a thick wall and cause a collapse, never mind tearing the people nearby into pieces. Unfortunately many people handling those bottles never learned much about them...

Re: How Not to Do It: Liquid Nitrogen Tanks

#13

Post by pstevensza » Wed, May 05, 2010, 8:08 AM UTC

btilly wrote: post #2

If you liked this blog entry, go check out http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with... which is a subselection of his blog entries about chemicals that he won't work with. For entertainingly good reason.

"There’s a report from the early 1950s (in this PDF) of a one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I'm sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks."

From http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa.... Brilliant.

Re: How Not to Do It: Liquid Nitrogen Tanks

#14

Post by kbob » Wed, May 05, 2010, 2:32 PM UTC

When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine worked for a physics prof who was researching something with superconductors. He cooled his experiments with liquid nitrogen. So we had a ready source.

We started by chilling our soft drinks with liquid nitrogen, then someone came up with the idea of sealing nitrogen into a 2-liter coke bottle. A coke bottle swells up to about double its original size before it pops, and it makes a most satisfying noise when it does. We'd use 1/2 liter of LN and wait about 10 minutes.

From there, we went to aerial explosions. Fill six trash bags with helium, tie them to a coke bottle of nitrogen, and let them float away. Ten minutes later, boom from somewhere high up and down wind.

I would like to take credit for all this, but in truth most of it was other guys' ideas. I was an enthusiastic implementor, though.

Re: How Not to Do It: Liquid Nitrogen Tanks

#15

Post by btilly » Wed, May 05, 2010, 3:51 PM UTC

pasbesoin wrote: post #11

btilly wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't edit it any more. :-(

I didn't mean to seem pedantic. :-) More just for those who get a blank page (the response I was receiving -- no visible indication of 404, at least with Flash, etc. blocked) and assume the site's timing out.

It is not pedantic. It is important and I am kicking myself for not having checked that the link was working.