3 ms·

The suggestion to use a magnesium frame, in combination with hydrogen for lift, is kind of hysterical. Why not use a flammable metal with your flammable lifting

• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  You need oxygen to get to the flammable material to burn it. For magnesium that means grinding it to a fine powder that burns really quick. Otherwise, it will just oxidize at the surface and be quite boring and inert. It's a common metal used for all sorts of engineering. E.g. German WWII era planes used some magnesium parts. Iron also burns if you grind it to a fine powder. You can try that out if you have some steel wool. It's just an exothermic oxydation process. The more surface area the hotter it burns. Magnesium just burns a bit hotter. Most of the colors in fireworks are just different metal powders burning. And for hydrogen, you need to mix it with oxygen to get a flammable mixture. So, a large mass of hydrogen is explosive in the same sense that a few tonnes of kerosene is explosive. I.e. not that much at all. Also, hydrogen is light. If you have a leak you go down, and the hydrogen goes up very rapidly. It doesn't stick around. They did this routinely in the 1930s. It wasn't much of an issue then. The theories of what happened to the hindenburg vary a bit but it seems as it didn't explode so much as burn. Probably most of the hydrogen escaped before it could burn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster Interesting read. Quite a few people actually survived. I'm sure these things could be engineered to a much higher safety standard now.