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