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Article: <[email protected]>
From: [email protected](Nancy )
Subject: Re: TUNGUSKA
Date: 17 Mar 1997 03:39:10 GMT
In article
<[email protected]>
Richard Caldwell writes:
> I agree that a bigger cloud of burning gas will cause more
> damage than a smaller one, but I have a basic problem with
> the rate of burning that would occur. I don't think methane
> is energetic enough to produce an explosion without being
> compressed in a container. As you say, the surrounding
> atmospheric pressure can act as a container, but this only
> works if your fuel/air mixture burns fast enough. Methane
> is not a fast burning gas.
>
> As an example, during WW-II there was a shortage of
> gasoline in many European countries. Some of those
> countries used methane generators to run their trucks,
> busses, and automobiles. It worked, but the mathane
> caused the vehicles to be very much under-powered.
>Richard Caldwell <[email protected]>
(Begin ZetaTalk[TM])
So here you have methane being used as a SUBSTITUTE for gasoline, but still it could not
cause an explosion? There is more than the speed of burn, as you put it, that is involved in
compression. The compression is in fact a HEAT layer, where heat is trying to escape
from an overburn by moving DOWN. Below is the ground, or heavy concentrations of
methane hissing out of the cracks, which burning will create an underburn. Above is the
overburn. No matter how slow or fast the sandwiched methane in the middle of this huge
cloud, which rises to the stratosphere, is burning, IT'S heat has nowhere to go! The
explosion may have taken a moment more to occur, but all the factors for an explosion are
present!
(End ZetaTalk[TM])