Posted by Vince on 6/1/2009, 8:14 pm
68.144.14.16
About the Texas City disaster?
Were you "there" when it happened?
The two biggest accidental explosions in the world occurred in Canada and the U.S. respectively. In 1917 a munitions ship loaded with picric acid (the precursor to TNT) blew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, leaving no trace of the ship in its original location. It leveled everything in a square mile.
In 1947, a ship loaded with 2300 tons of fertilizer (ammonium nitrate) blew up in a pier in Texas City. Folks in Galveston, 10 miles away where knocked off their feet by the blast. It virtually destroyed everything within a third of a mile around it, also knocking 2 planes out of the sky. The Tsunami it created, deposited a large barge about 100 feet inland, onto the ground.
16 hours later, a second ship nearby, holding nearly 1000 tons of fertilizer, also exploded, almost repeating the first scenario and setting a huge oil tank farm on fire.
All THREE of the ships that exploded -the first in Halifax and the other two in Texas City- were TOTALLY disintegrated. That is .... there was nothing left of them at ground 0 where they exploded. Like massive hand grenades, they fragmented into pieces and flew off in all directions.
This is rather exceptional for ship explosions. Many ships in the war were sunk when their internal explosives magazines caught fire and exploded. While they sank rapidly, they generally remained in one or two pieces.
What intrigues me about ammonium nitrate (fertilizer) is HOW it happens to contain so much locked-in energy. It's composed of extremely simple elements after all ...... all found in the air that we breath. Nitrogen and oxygen -(normal air has 78% nitrogen and 20% oxygen)- and hydrogen. (Water has 2 atoms of hydrogen locked to one atom of oxygen). So, essentially, ammonium nitrate is just air and water.
Now, we KNOW that it's not possible to create energy (or all of our energy needs would be easily solved~) and so .............. all of that enormous amount of energy released in a fertilizer explosion HAS to be stored into the molecular bond in the CREATION of the chemical. In other words, ALL of that energy has to be used up in the form of heating , during the CREATION of ammonium nitrate!
My guess is that a large part of the explosive force comes from the de-combining of ammonia gas into the individual components of nitrogen and hydrogen.
A given volume of nitrogen and hydrogen at a given temperature occupy the same amount of space respectively ...but when combined into NH3, the new volume of this ammonia gas occupies the same space as the original volume of nitrogen. So, in other words, one liter (or quart) of ammonia gas occupies the same space as a liter (or quart) of nitrogen ...... BUT ....... it also contains 1.5 liters (quarts) of hydrogen "pressed" into it. Thus and so ....... when ammonia "decomposes" instantly into the original gases, the space required is suddenly increased to 2.5 times what it just was.
To make ammonia gas, nitrogen and hydrogen are compressed to 250 atmospheres, (3675 ppsi), held at 400+ degrees Celsius (875 F) ..... and passed over an iron oxide catalyst in numerous sweeps. Each sweep results in only about 15% ammonia production but the continual recycling finally yields about 98% completion.
The nitrate portion is also created from the ammonia gas through a series of processes, to produce -first- nitric acid. The nitric acid is then reacted with ammonia to produce ammonium nitrate -NH4NO3.
What I found surprising as I researched the topic is that -while fertilizer explosives are generally made by adding diesel fuel to fertilizer- it isn't really necessary to have an additive to get fertilizer to explode. Adding diesel fuel simply guarantees that it WILL explode!
The discovery that ammonium nitrate can spontaneously explode, was made in Oppau Germany in 1921 when a fertilizer factory silo blew up after workers had used small dynamite charges inside the silo to break up the caked fertilizer. They'd done it before -allegedly 20,000 times without incident- but this ONE time ... the entire mass got triggered into an explosion.
Ironically, Germany HAD BEEN using ammonium nitrate all along, in WW1 as an explosive assistant but ......... they were under the impression that it was only utilized as an oxidant! That is ...... in an enclosed casing, when suddenly heated by a priming cap explosion, ammonium nitrate (like saltpeter in black gun powder) gives off free oxygen atoms which then rapidly burns the fuels inside of the containment and throws the projectile out of the barrel.
Seems rather bizarre when you think of it. All that time they COULD have been utilizing the explosive force of ammonium nitrate itself (in bomb form) but ...... just didn't know that it could be done!
-Vince
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