

How Not to Do It: Liquid Nitrogen Tanks - uptheirons
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/03/08/how_not_to_do_it_liquid_nitrogen_tanks.php

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btilly
If you liked this blog entry, go check out
[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/-)
which is a subselection of his blog entries about chemicals that he won't work
with. For entertainingly good reason.

~~~
pasbesoin
That URL needs to lose a trailing hyphen:

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/)

~~~
btilly
I can't edit it any more. :-(

~~~
pasbesoin
I didn't mean to seem pedantic. :-) More just for those who get a blank page
(the response I was receiving -- no visible indication of 404, at least with
Flash, etc. blocked) and assume the site's timing out.

~~~
btilly
It is not pedantic. It is important and I am kicking myself for not having
checked that the link was working.

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jacquesm
Two stories about stuff like this:

1)

A plumber in the town of Hilversum near Utrecht here once had an oxy-acetylene
rig like this one
[http://static.werktuigen.nl/afbeeldingen/advertentie/8577/1/...](http://static.werktuigen.nl/afbeeldingen/advertentie/8577/1/flessenwagen
---acetyleen-zuurstof.jpg) in the back of his trailer, hit a pretty heavy bump
in the road, the whole assembly fell out the back of the trailer.

Because of the force of the impact the reduction valve broke off from one of
the cylinders and the whole thing went rocketing up and into the roof of a
church a few hundred meters away.

2)

A company that I free-lanced for had inherited an extravagant espresso machine
from a bar that went out of business in Amsterdam. The thing was ancient and
had been repaired many times, and not exactly by experts.

Over Christmas 1985 it remained plugged in and when we returned to the office
on the 26th bits and pieces of the pressure tank were found embedded in the
plaster walls.

We were very lucky, if someone had been operating the thing when it blew it
would have been a 'closed casket' burial for sure.

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viraptor
Some time before, I attended a short course on handling the small/medium
propane tanks. It's like with the nitrogen tank - it's relatively small, some
people don't expect it to cause problems really -- but now I flinch every time
I see someone kicking/rolling the bottle (way too common thing). In reality it
could easily destroy a thick wall and cause a collapse, never mind tearing the
people nearby into pieces. Unfortunately many people handling those bottles
never learned much about them...

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dzlobin
Dave Arnold at www.cookingissues.com posted about this recently. Their
protocol for transferring the dewars includes letting the tank take the
elevator alone. One particular time a student had set the dewar down a little
hard, and the pressure had caused the tank to vent a minute later in the
elevator, and blow a hole in the ceiling of the elevator. Had anyone ridden
with it, they likely would have asphyxiated

edit: Link: [http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/03/12/ka-boom-liquid-
nitro...](http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/03/12/ka-boom-liquid-nitrogen-
safety-rules-are-there-for-a-reason/)

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kbob
When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine worked for a physics prof who
was researching something with superconductors. He cooled his experiments with
liquid nitrogen. So we had a ready source.

We started by chilling our soft drinks with liquid nitrogen, then someone came
up with the idea of sealing nitrogen into a 2-liter coke bottle. A coke bottle
swells up to about double its original size before it pops, and it makes a
most satisfying noise when it does. We'd use 1/2 liter of LN and wait about 10
minutes.

From there, we went to aerial explosions. Fill six trash bags with helium, tie
them to a coke bottle of nitrogen, and let them float away. Ten minutes later,
_boom_ from somewhere high up and down wind.

I would like to take credit for all this, but in truth most of it was other
guys' ideas. I was an enthusiastic implementor, though.

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MarkSweep
I feel a lot better about the big liquid nitrogen tank I had to sit next to
while at a internship last summer. That thing was hissing all the time.

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hartror
These stories are always turning up. If this isn't an excellent argument for
requiring physics be taught in high school I don't know what is.

