Confined burning experiments

MnOi- He called the gas vitriol air and reported that it was colourless, odourless and tasteless, and supported combustion better than common air, but the results did not appear until 1777 because of his publisher s negligence. Priestley s classic experiment of using a burning glass to calcine HgO confined in a cylinder inverted over liquid mercury was first performed in Colne, England, on 1 August 1774 he related this to A. L. Lavoisier and others at a dinner party... 

The hypothesis was borne out by quantitative studies of the burning of explosives under confinement. Macek Gipson (Refs 7, 8 13) investigated burning of cast Pentolite and DINA, while Griffiths Groocock (Ref 10) experimented with low-density granular PETN, RDX HMX... 

Van Helmont experimented also with chemical processes in which various gases are produced and was the inventor of the term gas to distinguish these substances from ordinary air or from easily condensible vapors. Especially was our carbon dioxide, which he called gas silvestre or spiritus silvestris, the object of his attention. We have already noted that he derived this word from chaos, a term used by Paracelsus as a sort of generalized term for air.4 Van Helmont burned sixty-two pounds of charcoal and found there was left one pound of ash. The other sixty-one pounds had disappeared as an invisible spirit. This spirit, hitherto unknown, I call by a new name gas, which cannot be confined in a vessel nor reduced to a visible body, unless its seed be first destroyed. 0 And again he says, Therefore with the privilege of a paradox and needing a name I have called this vapor gas, not very different from the chaos of the ancient secrets. He recognized that this gas... 

The growing technology provided experience in coping with the more conventional cryogenic hazards associated with material s brittleness, with cold flesh "burns," and with liquid to gas expansion in confined spaces. 

The true natural line width of the states without the complication of the phonon wing can be studied by low-temperature absorption holeburning experiments. Because Friedrich ([10] in this volume) presents a discussion of hole burning in protein spectroscopy, we confine ourselves to a brief review of the results of Vanderkooi using low-temperature fluroescence techniques. 

From the literature on blackpowder, the analytical chemistry data on ignition products is expected to contain a wide variety of chemicals. The average chemist would look at the laundry list of previously reported chemicals and despair of ever generating better data. Most of the analyses of products do not give the conditions of burning used in the experiments. Blackpowder is found to yield different products at different pressures and durations of confinement at temperature. There are simple chemical reasons for these differences in products. Applying the principle of Le Chatelier we find that the reactions should shift to compensate for the conditions of reaction. Examination of the literature shows the following list of products. 

Permits As a subject, permit systems is given specific mention in this causation model particularly because of the author s experience. As an example, far too many fires that occur as an outcome of welding, cutting, or burning have resulted in major property damage, personal injury, environmental damage, and business interruption. Either the permit system was inadequate or it was not properly managed. Similar comments apply to other permit systems—such as confined space entry, for example. 

The numerical model used to interpret cylinder wall expansion experiments must include a realistic description of build-up of detonation, Forest Fire burn and resulting detonation wave curvature. A problem in numerical simulation of long cylinders of explosive confined by thin metal walls is to obtain sufficient numerical resolution to describe the explosive burn properly and also to follow the simulation of long cylinders. The NOBEL code includes the necessary physics and will numerically model cylinder tests as described in Chapter 6. 

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