> >Actually, it was seriously explosive. An enclosed spoonful or so (I don't
> >know the exact amount since a friend with a death wish did the actual
> >mixing) was enough to blow a coconut and a silly hat into oblivion, and
> >leave a one meter wide crater in packed soil.
>
> Hmmm... Something isn't consistent here. If there was an explosion, it
> would have to be mostly due to the extremely exothermic nature of the
> mixture. The only component capable of explosion is potassium chlorate,
> which tends to be a pretty poor explosive, *especially* without the presence
> of an organic fuel. It was probably a mostly exothermic explosion (as
> opposed to deflagration or detonation).
The mixture was enclosed in the shell of a coconut. Maybe some kind of
reaction occured between the organic shell and the mixture (the very hot
high-oxygen mixture that the initial ignition resulted in ought to do
something interesting to cellulose).
An interesting possibility is to use cesium salts, which shifts down the
spectrum, to move more radiation into the infrared. I think we tried it
together with magnesium, but had no clear results.
> Which leads me to question the one meter wide crater. Unless the charge was
> buried, this number is *way* too large. Using military explosives, this
> would require a block of TNT, which has an order of magnitude more power
> than potassium chlorate under the best of circumstances. The crater may
> have seemed large at the time, though. Either that or there was *a lot*
> more than a couple spoonfuls of the chlorate mixture. What kind of depth
> did you get?
Only a centimeter or so... so the charge wasn't that military grade. But
there is a real possibility of a larger charge since Ingvar, the warped
mind behind actually *doing* the experiment, may have gone against my
advise of a small amount. He also created a far too large batch of
nitrogen tri-iodide that nobody dared to move from the lab. Now he is as
far as I know studying moral philosophy and computer science.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html
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