Oxy-acetylene safety demonstration - GIF

[bruce.desertrat]

Agreed - explainations really are needed because without them, it is just playing.

I saw an experiment MIT did for the USAF which measured the velocities of various gases used in a potato cannon (yeah, this is the stuff DOGE should be looking at) and this is what was concluded:
[/B]

This reminds me of William Proxmire who used to make his 'Golden Fleece Awards' by cherry picking something and then proclaiming it 'wasteful spending'

I doubt very much that the actual AF proposal was 'determine the best fuel mixture to propel a potato' . Rather it was a proposal to determine optimal gas mixtures for a gas-fired cannon or other something else powered by igniting gas mixtures, and MIT had a high-speed video camera, and potato gun lying around to use for the study. It's a known system that was easy to to perform accurate experiments with.

It's like infamous 'shrimp treadmill' being flagged as wasteful government spending, when the treadmill portion of the money was about $1000 (after the prototype to prove it worked was built from scrap) out of a much larger grant for studying commercially valuable seafood species. (the treadmill portion was designed to quantitatively measure shrimp reaction to varying water quality )

[BuffaloJohn]

I doubt very much that the actual AF proposal was 'determine the best fuel mixture to propel a potato' . Rather it was a proposal to determine optimal gas mixtures for a gas-fired cannon or other something else powered by igniting gas mixtures, and MIT had a high-speed video camera, and potato gun lying around to use for the study. It's a known system that was easy to to perform accurate experiments with.

Here is one citation:
[1305.0966] Studying the Internal Ballistics of a Combustion Driven Potato Cannon using High-speed Video

It's published here in the European Journal of Physics
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/1...-0807/34/4/915

Here is the MIT article:
https://www.technologyreview.com/201...le-velocities/

There is NO information regarding any alternate motive.

The only takeaway that I had in mind when mentioning the article was the relative velocity of acetylene versus some other gases when ignited - which is useful when explaining the danger of some gases.