So last night on Mythbusters, they proved that you can get a big explosion by igniting a 10lb bucket of thermite resting on 10lbs of ice blocks. They had no explanation as to why this happens. What do you think?
Well, you carry a UB-21 Schnauzer with an OPS Silencer, that's KGB, You prefer an 18-K over an AK, Your surveillance technique is NSA, Your ID is CIA, you recieved your PHD at NYU, traded in your GTO for a BMW, you listen to CD's by REM and STP, and you'd like to see JFK in his BVDs getting down with OPP and you probably put the toilet paper back on the roll with the paper on the inside...
On the show, one of them theorized that it was water decomposing to hydrogen and oxygen, then igniting, but that doesn't make sense to me, since that's basicly no change. The energy gained by ignition was already spent cooling the whole thing down earlier. You'd think that if the thermite was going to ignite such gasses, that it would happen pretty much coincident with their creation...
I thought that maybe the ice that the thermite came into contact with went so quickly from solid to gas that it forced the solids around it to burst in order to make room for itself.
The thermite melts into the ice until its about at the center of the blocks, at which point it very quickly superheats a pocket of water. Superheated water will indeed explode upon agitation or contact with a nucleation site, which there are plenty in this situation. Normally the water wouldn't have a chance to superheat without starting to boil but thermite burns so hot and so quickly that all of this can probably happen in half a second or something. The pocket of water will flash to steam and blow apart the ice and thermite (making it look like a fiery explosion in the process).
Yea, that's what I was thinking. The steam just blew out the thermire in all directions ...I could tell quite a bit of that was steam. I would assume blowing the thermite out would expose even more of its surface area to oxygen.
The idea conditions for explosion are equal parts oxidant and feul. If well planned, the thermite already provides that, which is another reason I don't buy most of the theories.
The idea conditions for explosion are equal parts oxidant and feul.
Your idea is feul.
"Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today." - Stephen Wolfram
What I meant to say was that the ideal conditions for explosion are balanced oxygen providers and consumers, but it didn't come out that way...
This is the thermite reaction aka aluminothermic reaction:
Fe2O3 + 2 Al → 2 Fe + Al2O3
As someone said it would happen in space or in a total vacuum, so oxygen is not needed at all. Regarding your point of perfect balance, well it's the thermite mix itself, if you respect these proportions it will burn completely.
One possible source of explosion would be dihydrogen which is highly explosive (it's what pretty much destroyed the Chernobyl nuclear reactor), I just don't see how it could get created in these conditions. Sublimination of water or even ice is a much more likely.
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