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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Hexane? How would that be explosive? I'd expect it to just make a big fire.
The vapors of hexane are highly explosive. There have been several industrial accidents caused by them.
All they had to do was to have the tanks leak a small amount to build up vapors in the back of the truck. Then trigger a small ignition source to ignite them.
This would cause the initial blast and light all the liquid on fire. The high heat generated by the fire damaged the bridge further.
It's like gasoline, basically. Actually, there's a lot of it in gasoline. The thing is it's tricky getting just the right fuel-air mix for something like that to blow up. I wonder if there was additional high explosive inside to disperse it first.
Somebody claimed that it wasn't hexane, but hexogen.
Yeah I assumed this is just a mistranslation or a mixup, since hexogen and hexane do sound similar. For those of you not in the know, hexogen is also known as cyclonite or RDX and it's what makes eg. C4 or Semtex go boom, while hexane is a very boring (in comparison) organic compound that doesn't go boom nearly as much.
Ahhh! So RDX, if someone else hasn't heard the name. Yeah, that makes sense. I bet it was a mistranslation.
@CanadaPlus @Wilshire
Fuel air bomb. Similar this one with methane but it will work with any flammable vapour.
http://www.dynamicscience.com.au/tester/solutions1/chemistry/collisiontheory.htm
Huh, that's really cool! It uses the fuel itself as a fuse to time the explosion. Hexane is a liquid, though, so the same principle wouldn't quite work.
I'm buying that it was a mistranslation of "hexogen" (the high explosive RDX) at this point.
@CanadaPlus
In liquid form absolutely agree.
But hexane is quite volatile so you can get a vapour mix fairly easily.
I have done this demo using methylated spirits by shaking the can before lighting and you get a nice boom.
Getting a whole truckload to be stable for most of the journey and then to mix enough to go boom on the bridge is not in within the expertise of this chemistry teacher but I can see it might be possible.
Interesting point about Hexogen, but would be harder to hide it.
@CanadaPlus
It is a really cool demonstration though - and very useful for showing quite a few different things by changing the fuel.