C3H8 aka Propane

                  

         This experiment is one of my most popular due to the fact that it gets the adrenaline pumping! Please excuse my friend, he was caught off guard. With this experiment all I did was acquire a 36 inch balloon that I got at Party City and fill it up with propane using an adapter I got on Amazon shipped from Canada. This is legal by the way but it is...frowned upon. I normally conduct this experiment when I have friends or family over but my original intension for this project was to study the difference from combustion from explosion, normal people get them confused all the time. This is actually a combustion due to the fact that it is not a rapid increase in volume that takes place imparting momentum to the reaction particles with a production of a subsonic shock wave, meaning explosion makes shock waves and combustions do not. I ignited the balloon using toilet paper because I needed a delayed fuse that acts as a miniature fire, if you use a firework fuse you pop the balloon but the fuse will not give off enough heat to ignite the propane and because propane is heavier than air it will just land softly on the ground and dissipate. But if you had a fire near you like I did when the propane is crawling on the ground it will then ignite causing your entire driveway to become a beautiful and terrifying sea of fire for around five seconds. Symptoms from this are neighbors screaming, hysterical laughter, active adrenaline, and rapidly trying to figure out ways to hide this from your parents….not necessarily in that order.

 

 

 

Just for the record this is my foundry! <3

 

Welcome to Explosions 101

Hey there fellow blog readers my name is Michael and during this blog I will be showing you some of my homemade experiments and as you can already guess the majority of such experiments will be explosions. Some of you may ask, Why make a blog about explosions? My answer to you is why isn't every blog about explosions? To me explosions are the most beautiful thing in the world and I love to share that with everyone and what better way to show the world than in a blog? Ever since I was a young member of the human race I was obsessed with science I come from a family of scientists so I basically grew up with it. Science is all around us and when I was little my family always gave me the scientific definition of what I was looking at. But that only happens at family reunions because both of my parents are in the film industry my father is a writer, producer, and director and my mother is a location scout who previously worked for the TV series Burn Notice. But even being non profession scientists they still taught me the basics of the universe. Now setting that aside, most of my experiments involve heat because being a future material engineer I work with foundries which are basically ovens on steroids. My foundry goes up to 2500 Fahrenheit and I have successfully melted iron, but mostly I melt aluminum since it’s so easy to work with. By Friday I will have my first experiment ready for this blog and ill tell you the science behind it incase your curious. Hope you enjoy this blog my fellow classmates!