Oxy-acetylene safety demonstration - GIF

[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.