Shaking Buildings Over a Mile Away!

Hi I really think you'll like this video today if you're familiar with the channel you know we make some pretty high energy videos and I'm not just talking about me, the huge drone, the jet engines, the megawatt lasers were nice . I'm familiar with high energy experiments, but today we're going to step things up a couple of levels, so I want to reiterate the written warning that we gave at the beginning of this video, although what I'm going to show you here is very easy to do, It's dangerous and that's why I'm going to repeat the warning: don't try it yourself.

If you're just interested in the explosions, you can skip this topic, but what I'd like to start with is knowing what's going on here and why. This is important. We came up with the idea of ​​looking at hydrogen burning because I built a pulse detonation engine and based on research it seems that a hydrogen and oxygen fuel will be the optimal combination for a pulse detonation engine. Also, we are building a high engine experiment with high altitude balloons and thought about the idea of ​​using hydrogen as a low cost alternative to helium as a lift gas.

After doing this research, it is pretty clear to me that the detonation engine will benefit from using hydrogen and oxygen, but using flammable hydrogen in a large lift bag or a large weather balloon and I'm not sure it's a good idea, but you can make your own decision after watching the video, so which basically happens when we make explosives. When we talk about explosives, we're looking at two main categories, one is the type of decomposition of the explosives, examples of that would be, for example, TNT trinitrotoluene RDX, one of my favorites, which is uranium-235 glycol trinitrate.

This type of reaction occurs when a particle or molecule that is relatively stable, when activated, will break down or reconfigure two reaction products that are even more stable and in the process release a lot of heat. The other category of explosives is a type of burning type combustion explosive and that is, gasoline in your engine or let's say dust and a grain silo dust air burning hydrogen and oxygen burning and deuterium and tritium in a fusion reactor now leaving us alone With today's chemical reactions the decomposition process is an intramolecular process that tends to be very rapid and you typically have reaction rates that are in the range of about six to eight kilometers per second the combustion type of reaction is sort of two stages, you have to put together these moderately stable precursors, then they have to react to form a more stable reaction product and so it tends to be slower, typical burning rates in that category are in the range of two to two and a half kilometers per second, with the only exception of hydrogen and oxygen properly mixed or in an optimal mixture, it can reach speeds as much as four kilometers per second it is the fastest type of combustion reaction that can be obtained besides hydrogen and fluorine and now you don't want work with fluoride.

Basically what happens when we burn hydrogen and oxygen is that hydrogen and oxygen do not exist in the atmosphere as individual atoms hydrogen exists as a diatomic molecule H bonded to H similarly it is a diatomic molecule oxygen and oxygen and at room temperature, Although these molecules may be in the same volume in the same container, they do not burn because this bond here is called a covalent bond, it means that essentially the two partners share the electrons and it is reasonably stable, the same goes for oxygen, so Even if they approach each other within a volume of gas, essentially these bonds are stable enough that the two partners cannot exchange partners to form the reaction product which, as I'm sure you know, is h2o, which is you can draw like this now, this link, however, depends on temperature, essentially, what happens at any point above absolute zero is this link. is vibrating, there is an intramolecular vibration of thermal vibration, the hotter the gas is, the more vigorously it vibrates and sure enough, if heated enough, the particles would actually dissociate, so the bond weakens as the temperature increases , furthermore, as these particles bounce off. each other, the hotter the mixture gets, the more vigorously they bounce off each other and the more they distort their electron clouds, so you can draw this in a sort of modification of what's called an energy diagram and, effectively, what this What it means is that unless you can convert these bonds unless you can add enough energy so that these bonds start to stretch and weaken enough and unless you can bind them together tightly enough that they don't react, you have to overcome this barrier of energy but if it reaches the ignition temperature that sufficiently weakens the bonds and increases the kinetic energy of the interactions, it can cause them to form more stable bonds and in the process give up a lot of energy.

It takes a lot of energy to dissociate water. into hydrogen and oxygen and a lot of energy is obtained when water is formed, so it is easy to make it difficult to break it now, the heat given off from this process is expressed in thermal radiation, actually this radiation heat emits photons , but most of it is actually retained in the water molecule as extremely vigorous vibrations of the H o bond. Actually, it's so hot that some of them will dissociate, but the point is that this is vibrating very, very vigorously, and what happens is if you say a little bit.

A little oxygen molecule here that's wandering around and finally gets to this point here, can pick up some of that vibrational energy, heat up the oxygen molecule and also send it at a very, very high speed where it can collide with another potential partner. and start this reaction again, this process will progress from the ignition point outward in what is called a flame front. Now if you have a terrible mixture, let's say you have tons of extra hydrogen or tons of extra oxygen or you have a parasitic buffer gas. such as atmospheric nitrogen, will interfere with this transfer of this energy that is being absorbed by the oxygen and will cause some of that energy to be lost in the parasitic gases that will radiate into the unreacted material outside the flame front.

Now, hopefully, this is What's Happening in Your Car Engine? Because this heat that is distributed from the reaction zone will spread isotropically, that is, uniformly in all directions and, as the combustion progresses, the temperature within the volume will increase slowly and eventually, when everything is burned, it will reach an equilibrium temperature. and then everything will start to cool, however, if you have an optimal mixture of these two components and there are no stray gases, there is nothing to interfere with this transfer of energy, this movement of energy to new potential reaction products and this occurs. reaction or this transfer of energy occurs susonically just like light is the speed limit in space-time at which information or effect can be transmitted from one point to another the analogy in matter is the speed of sound is the limit to which elastic collisions can transmit energy or an effect throughout the medium and when the reaction occurs above the speed of sound, effectively all the reaction products around the flame front on the outside that are not already involved they are not affected by the fact that no heat is distributed to it, so none of the other gases heat up the pressure.

It doesn't increase, the volume doesn't expand and none of the energy is distributed to the rest of these gases, as a result they just sit there, fat and happy, unaware of the devastation headed their way as a consequence of all the energy. It is concentrated in this very thin flame front that is moving susonically

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from the reaction zone and when I say thin I mean thin like microns thick and because that concentrated energy is in that thin sheet of expanding gases, the pressures and the temperatures are orders of magnitude, meaning a factor of 10 higher than what they will eventually reach when all this gas is burned and the maximum equilibrium temperature is reached.

Furthermore, unlike isotropic expansion and heating in a volume of gas, shock waves tend to be directional and therefore will not just move. far from the point of initiation in a favored direction, but they can actually be reflected inside a container, they can even be reflected in pressure variations within the gas, so not only do you get a concentration of energy in time because it is very thin, but you can get a concentration in place because the shock waves can be focused so that you can reach orders of magnitude hundreds of times the maximum pressure you would reach at equilibrium and when complete learning occurs at the point of contact with a shock wave and this is how it can cut steel and this is how it can break concrete now if you are going to try to burn this as efficiently as possible use all the potential energy what you want is what is called a stoichiometric mixture and that is a chemical term for something perfect mixture of hydrogen and oxygen so that when the reaction is complete you have used up all the oxygen, you have no hydrogen left, everything has been used up and the way to determine what that golden ratio is is to balance the equation Now In chemistry, balancing an equation can be a real headache if you have a very complex reaction, but in this case it is a very simple thing to do.

It's interesting to see how it works. The typical way to write this is that we have. a diatomic molecule then we have h2 and similarly we have a diatomic molecule we have Oh. To balance this we can see that we have to use at least two oxygens, therefore we need to produce at least two waters, but in that case then twice two hydrogens or four hydrogens are required on this side, so we do this and that's it, we have balanced the equation and what this means is that we need two molecules of hydrogen for every molecule of oxygen or at standard temperature and pressure, room and atmospheric temperature. pressure, that means we need twice the volume of hydrogen than oxygen, so one cubic meter of this would require two cubic meters of this now, if you want to go a little deeper down the rabbit hole, there's another principle called cross section o reaction dynamics and becomes As these particles are very different in their mass, oxygen is 16 times heavier than hydrogen and tends to be a large molecule that moves at about 300 meters per second at room temperature.

Hydrogen is a very small molecule, which is why it escapes. balloons and it travels at about 1,200 meters per second, so if what we do is use a combination that's actually a little rich, we'll waste a little bit of hydrogen, and we use three parts hydrogen to one part oxygen, we'll get an increase. in the detonation speed and it is probably because hydrogen takes the energy

away

more quickly because it is very light, but we can reach 4000 meters per second with an optimal mixture and that is what we are going to use for our experiments, now another type of The good thing about working with hydrogen and oxygen as an explosive is that it is non-toxic, hydrogen and oxygen are toxic, water is certainly not toxic, most decomposition type explosives are very toxic, they are poisonous e.g. , nitroglycerin is a less powerful drug.

More than one milligram absorbed into your system is a potent vasodilator; it actually relaxes the smooth muscles inside the blood vessels and that's why people who suffer from angina related to a relatively low flow of blood in the heart can relieve it by taking less than a milligram of that stuff, that drug and ingesting it will dilate some of the secondary blood vessels in the heart, blood flow will improve and the cramp will disappear. However, the important thing is that if you try to manufacture or synthesize nitroglycerin, you will have a severe headache because it does the same with the small blood vessels of the brain, increasing intercranial pressure.

Finally, oxygen and hydrogen are a mixture of gases. fairly diffuse low density, so you can work with them a little safer than any high explosive because even a very small amount of that will put a hole in your bench and send shrapnel everywhere, so with that in mind , let's go ahead and play with it. Well, what we have here is a plastic container with some bubble juice in it. a slight modification of the formula that Nighthawk and Light gave on their channel describing the huge bubbles it makes in the formula they use. We will review the mod when we make the video about the big bubble machine that will appear in the near future, but in any case, what we will do is use this bubble juice to make some bubbles using different gas mixtures and then we will turn them on.

Now, the first mix that I will show you. it's just pure hydrogen on the red balloon for the H Balmer line for you astronomers andspectroscopy, and I have a little valve. I'm going to open the valve and we're going to form some bubbles here because my cameraman didn't volunteer for this. I'm going to do this, wet my hands a little bit and I'm going to grab a bunch of bubbles and we're going to light this up, uh, let me see if I have a little more. I could do it again here, okay? It's pretty cool now what we're going to do is use the oxygen and hydrogen mixture and this is a different animal so we're going to use some safety equipment in this case and one thing you'll notice.

It's just that I'm not going to wear my gloves even though I'm wearing ear protection and eye protection, I don't need them, that's okay and for you headphone users, this is a warning, this is going to be loud. , so you might want to turn things down, okay, here we go, what a different animal right now, there isn't, there's an unexpected side effect to doing it. this and that is you can't do this without smiling, yeah , it's funny and the funny thing is about ten days ago I was playing here blowing bubbles and jumping and having fun so I wanted to show it to my family so I invited my wife and my kids and they were watching this and we were blowing bubbles and smiling and laughing and having fun and then I heard a knock on the door back there and I thought, "Oh, the neighbors opened the door." door and he's a delivery guy, I think he was from FedEx or UPS, he was a new guy, I didn't recognize him and he walked up and looked at me and said, aren't you that guy on YouTube and I said?

Well, yeah, and it's not far-fetched since the channels got big enough for some strangers to recognize me, but he said I really liked that video you made about chocolate a couple of months ago and I said, oh yeah really because you know we still have the chocolate up there you know we have some left over and he said yeah I really like that video it's really good and I said would you like to see an explosion? and he said and I said no it's going to be okay so I go ahead and give him a pair of headphones and I put them on him and I did the explosion in front of him and he jumps back and he's smiling he likes it like that and I said: Would you like me to do it again? and I went ahead and he says yes so I did it again and he's smiling like a little kid and I think the reason you have to laugh when you do this is because it's kind of a silly combination of silly bubbles and devastating power of the explosion that you just don't do.

I don't seriously expect it, although the reason this is important is because pulse detonation engines are at the forefront of research in both jet engines and rocket engines because the fact is that the shock wave is such an efficient way of converting chemical energy into directional kinetic energy that even the highest-performance military jet engine with afterburning could approach exhaust velocities on the order of mm, almost Mach 3, but when I detonate these small bubbles, the wave of shock and gas shoot away from my hand at over Mach 9 and that's why I wanted to bring The point about the gloves is that when I did this second reaction it hurts a little but it's like being hit with a ruler, it doesn't make heat in the first case I needed the gloves because it is a little hot but because all the energy is being carried away by the shock wave, there is very little heat left and that is what makes it such an efficient source of thrust because you are not exhausting an incandescent gas, it is more like a laser, it is almost coherent, it is a directional kinetic energy that occurs when the reaction occurs. and the only real problem with building these pulse detonation engines aside from achieving injustice is because it's so powerful that it effectively destroys equipment, so if we're going to have bigger explosions, we're going to have to go outside, okay?

It's the test stand we built to blow up some balloons and I grabbed one of my son's antenna tripods as a stand and made this thing to blow up the balloons. If you look, you'll see there's a red line of hydrogen coming in. From this side, an oxygen line enters here and both enter this T-piece that passes through two check valves, one for each line, which prevents the retrograde filling of a gas in the other line so that we do not contaminate the lines of typical supply. Industrial check valves do not work with the low pressures that the balloon will create, so we are actually using aquarium check valves which work very well to prevent retrograde flow.

The tea piece is then connected to a locking fitting that has a length of six millimeters. or a quarter inch diameter stainless steel pipe that goes from this point here about a yard or a meter up and comes out the end right up here and then surrounds it with a larger diameter nylon electrical insulating tube that it goes from here all the way up and not to the same point and finally there is an aluminum fitting here that has a larger diameter aluminum tube that goes around the nylon tube and again goes almost to the top, there is a small piece of aluminum tube silicone that acts as a sealing gasket, so the only way the gas gets in and out is through the port up here and finally there's a piece of aluminized tape that's stuck over the gasket so we end up with a spark of discharge that will occur between the belt and this inner tube.

I see that we have a high voltage line connected here and a ground line that is connected here so we can create the spark up here, these very long wires then proceed to take us about 30 feet away so I can get away from this and at that point I have a high-voltage power supply that produces a train of microsecond pulses of one kilohertz frequency of approximately 40,000 volts that produce a very hot spark to initiate the explosion. Up here you'll also notice that there's a third filler tube here. which fills a space between the outside of the nylon insulating tube and the inside of this larger diameter nylon ground connection - and there's a little port located here that allows gas to flow between here and this point and we'll get to that a little bit A little later, you will see the sign below.

There is an inside joke and if you are interested you can look it up but if you want a clue look at Princeton University and if you want another clue look for the IV microphone and when you get the answer you will know how tight we had considered using as an alternative to the one finished. Anyway, what I'm going to do is put a balloon up here with pure hydrogen and we're going to use that as a reference point, okay, so I'm just going to fill it with pure hydrogen and I'm going to show you that when I use the spark, this doesn't It works, the reason is that there is no oxygen there, so I have to detonate this or explode this with an external flame like the bubbles inside, ready three two one very good, eh, now what we are going to do is the same, but one mixture of oxygen and hydrogen is okay, so what we're going to do is I.

I'm going to use these rings as ways to measure volume so I can get the three to one ratio: one ring is about 50% larger than the other and I'm going to use the equation 4/3 PI R cubed for the volume of a sphere if we use the smaller ring and fill it with oxygen we will know when we have some oxygen so my cameraman will turn on the oxygen and start filling the balloon with just pure oxygen to start almost good and then fill it with hydrogen okay. Now, in this case, it's going to be a lot louder, so I'm going to put on my headphones and, again, for the headphone users, let's go ahead and give you a pretty good warning, huh?

Just with this little balloon. You will see some videos on YouTube where some chemistry teachers fill a balloon with some oxygen and some hydrogen, tie it to a string and light it with a candle in front of a chemistry class trying to interest the chemistry students of the semester. The difference between chemistry through explosions here is that because we are using an optimal mixture, not the typical stoichiometric mixture, this is a much brighter or faster explosion, also, because we are lighting this from the center of the balloon with a spark extremely hot instead of this. the explosion has to travel the entire distance of the balloon with an external flame, we are detonating and producing an explosive projectile that moves outward from the center, so essentially the balloon explodes about three times faster than it normally would in one of these other demos, that's what makes this a much more powerful demo due to the fact that we're optimizing the way the explosion occurs in this and the direction that the shock wave travels, but from this little balloon we have a pretty awesome result, however, I bet I know what you're thinking, I'm right, let's try it, how can you not s

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Okay, we managed to remove all the snow from our roof and now it has a pretty good reverb, as you can imagine, we are. We are not going to get any bigger than this, we are not going to fill a weather balloon with this, it is simply too much, also for safety, once we filled this balloon, what we did was confirm the size and then we disconnected the lines to the supply tanks in case the check valves didn't work, we didn't want any chance of us recoiling and sending a detonation back down the line, but an interesting application of this is that about 6070 years ago, during World War II, at that time , it did not have very sophisticated electronics, very light electronics, capacitors and flash lamps, so for reconnaissance purposes they needed a light, compact and very powerful light source, so what they developed was called the OMB bee tube. of argon, argon candle or argon flash, and basically What happened is they took a very powerful small explosive and placed it inside a larger cylinder into which they injected some argon gas, so what would happen is that the detonation wave as it moved through the gas would compress it, heat it and make it. would shine with a tremendously bright level of light because argon, unlike nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, is a noble gas and does not have intramolecular vibrations that consume part of the energy, so it has a very low specific heat, so what the shock wave heats it up.

It reached very high temperatures and produced light from deep UV to visible, by blowing this thing up under low flying planes you could actually light up large fields for taking photographs back in the day when electronics would have been quite a thing. uncomfortable to take on board a light airplane, so what we're going to do is wait a little bit until it gets dark and then we're going to fill one of these balloons again, but in addition to putting the hydrogen and oxygen in there, we're going to put a second balloon on top of there and it will stretch over that side port that I was talking about and we will fill it with a thin layer, an additional layer around the inner balloon of pure argon and so when the shock wave leaves the inner balloon, it will compress the argon and will produce a very bright light, so we will wait until it gets dark, fill the double balloons and repeat this experiment one more time and See how bright the light is we can make 5 4 3 2 1 let's get everything together soon, but if the police come, there's nothing here, let's just throw it in quick so besides wasting time and annoying our neighbors once again, there are some interesting applications where a hydrogen and oxygen explosive could be useful and one of them is the ability to disarm a mixture explosive When you light a firecracker on the 4th of July, you will set off a firecracker and it will go off.

Fuse, you run away from it, it's not a big deal, but when it doesn't go off, you know you wait a little bit, then you go in there, you kick it and maybe pour some water on it, but what do you do if you have? a really big explosive, at what point would you feel safe to approach it again? One of the interesting things we're building is a shaped charge using a metal liner that sits at the end of a pressure vessel that we can fill. at 20 atmospheres with a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, hopefully we are going to produce a concentrated jet of supersonic material that can potentially traverse great distances, pierce, pierce great distances through armored plate or steel or concrete, but most importantly is that although we are using the same check valve. technology that we use to fill the balloons, we are also going to add a solenoid that will allow us to throw away the gas mixture if for whatever reason it does not go off or we decide that we want to disarm it, one of the nice things about an explosive such as a hydrogen and oxygen explosive. is that you can take it apart now, these huge containers will have several hundred thousand foot pounds of energy available and unlike, say, a balloon that just throws supersonic balloon fragments around, this is much more dangerous, so If we're going to detonate something like this, what we'll do is dig a trench, produce and build a bunker so that whatever explodes stays underground and is safe, and we can actually do it.

I don't do this in this kind of weather, so we'll have to wait a little before we see that video, but we hope that what alreadyWe have shown them to be quite interesting, exciting, fun and make a lot of people s

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. If you like what we are doing, subscribe to the channel. Press the bell. Leave us a comment. I read them all and if you have questions I try to answer as many as I can and that interaction really helps. build the channel because what has happened in the last few years since about 2016 is that YouTube has redirected people away from their original content creators, they are trying to become like Netflix or Apple TV and what made YouTube was YouTube was content original from youtubers. and after about 2016, if you hadn't grown your channel, it's almost impossible to do so now if you rely only on YouTube promotion, so the most important thing you could do for us is share the videos wherever you do to sort them. of direct people into the channel will help us grow and the bigger we get, the more we can afford to do because, as you can imagine, what we do here, although it is a lot of fun, costs a lot of money and requires a lot of effort. time and by promoting this and helping us grow we can do even more and we can produce more videos more frequently in any case I want to thank you very much for watching I wish you a very good night, stay safe and take care of yourselves.