Slashdot Mirror
Hydrogen-Powered Aircraft == Anti-Terrorist Device?
maladroit asks: "Today on NPR's Talk of the Nation/Science Friday , Harry Braun of the Phoenix Project said that a hydrogen-powered airplane would not have produced the fire and intense heat that brought down the World Trade Center towers. Is this true ? What are the other advantages and disadvantages of hydrogen fuel ? Details on the Phoenix Project's website are a bit sketchy, but I'm sure the Slashdot crowd has some answers (and Richard Dean Anderson jokes)." Sounds like a good theory, it doesn't account for the hostage aspect, but it would prevent the use of aircraft as cheap bombs. Would there be any drawbacks? How much would such a refit cost for your average commercial aircraft?
I wrote about this the day after the attack:
Something I just thought of a little while ago, to help me gain some perspective on what happened:
A Boeing 767-400ER [boeing.com] has a maximum takeoff mass of a shade more than 200,000 kg. It has a typical cruise speed of 840 km/h.
Using our favorite formula for kinetic energy, that comes to about 5.6 billion Joules, or between one and two tons of TNT.
Or, in other words, just the force of that much mass at that speed is about the same as a WWII blockbuster bomb. Add in some twenty thousand gallons of jet fuel...and I still can't wrap my mind around that much destructive force.
And I thought cars on the freeway were deadly!
May such magnificient machines never again be used for such awful, awful purpose.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
A hydrogen powered plane's fuel tanks would have blown up all at once. The reason the WTC attacked worked is that airplane fuel is sticky and burns slowly when there are massive amounts of it, so it got all over the inside of the building and generated insane amounts of heat over time, starting other fires, etc. Hydrogen would have just blown up, with a small explosion and a lot of fire at impact, but little other damage.
Hydrogen is unlikely to be seen as a viable fuel, however, because for so many years it was believed that the Hindenburg was destroyed because of the hydrogen that held it aloft. Even now that the truth is known (The Hidenburg went down because the skin was painted with powdered aluminum, AKA rocket fuel, and when the mooring line grounded arcing electricity caught the aluminum on fire.), it is rarely spoken of because so many sources still quote hydrogen as the source of the explosion.
Asbestos has no chance against the heat generated by a fuel fire. Asbestos is good for things like paper fires which burn at 400-500 degrees. At the temprature the main fire was buring at asbestos, steel, and concret melts and vaporize. Asbestos coating would of just put another thing in the air.
Besides asbestos is not an environmentilst issue, its a heath issue. For what asbestos did there are better ways of doing it. If you'd like me to cover your house in asbestos than feel free. But don't come complaining when you get cancer from it, or other lung problems.
Unfortunately, I think people forget that hydrogen-fuelled jet airliners would likely use liquid hydrogen as its fuel.
Unlike hydrogen gas (which burns relatively safely), liquid hydrogen when it ignites will do it with a force that makes a dynamite explosion seem like a minor event. If the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center were fuelled by liquid hydrogen, the initial fuel explosion would have so much kinetic force that the building would have collapsed right there and then.
If I remember from the Challenger explosion, when the solid rocket booster leak ignited the fuel in the external fuel tank the force of the explosion was equivalent to a 1 kT tactical nuclear warhead. That's why liquid hydrogen must be handled with extreme care.