A room filled with flammable gas can be made to explode by placing a magazine in a kitchen toaster and turning it on. Based on a scene in the film The Bourne Supremacy. Episode 161 - Blue Ice
That effect from the very high methane ratio lighting up (as seen from the in-room camera) was way better than most of the stuff I've seen built out of CGI... Certainly better than the Hollywood standard issue explosion.
Structure wasn't properly sealed. If it were, trust me, it would have blown the house to bits. If you don't believe me, go look what happened to 29 miners in New Zealand at the Pike River disaster. Methane build up, one spark blew the entrance, another build up caused an even bigger explosion that destroyed the ventilation. Hollywood got their inspiration from somewhere. And that would be from the Mafia and other such organised crime groups at the time.
@@MCshadr217 I agree. They need to measure the percentage of methane in the air. By the way, can a toaster ignite the air before it ignites the magazine? The coil gets pretty hot
Do you know what a standard issued shipping container costs? Its not that easy. But i get what you mean, like try it in a bunker, i would guess it wouldnt do much there.
We get some natural gas explosions in homes in the UK as it's a mains supply. And believe me it blows big brick built houses to fragments, everything gone, bricks all seperated and blown away.
porpus99 They went for the ideal ratio based on the tests. Too much gas and there isn't enough oxygen for the flame. I've witnessed a gas explosion once myself and the result was quite similar to this one, it had enough force to blow away the weakest parts (in that case, the door and windows) while the overall structure remained intact, and it was an ideal scenario with a leak from an industrial-grade gas tank inside a building with doors and windows closed. If a methane explosion takes out a house, I don't think said house was structurally safe in first place.
Because the show house was very flimsy in comparison to a real building, it weakened sooner and the blast pressure dropped well below what it can build up to in a real house.
the last natural gas explosion that happened near me managed to blow the back end off a structurally sound 60 year old brick built house structurally damage the house next door and throw bricks 60 feet but it is incredibly rare you get an explosion from a gas leak.
The way the explosion blows the wall out and the air flows back in is brilliant, reminds me of a back draft. I believe the inflow of oxygen also collaped the roof
I think the reason Hollywood shows gas-fire explosions as a "BOOM" rather than this is because this looks so incredibly surreal, that people would think it was a poor attempt to do CGI. The fact there's a ball of barely visible fire, emanating from single point source, and everything just randomly catching fire for seemingly no reason just because methane or natural gas burns so cleanly, and without the "usual" fire characteristics of being red/orange/yellow/blue would seem so foreign to people, they'd maybe see it as interesting, but not expected, and remove them from any potential action. Gas is really cool.
This is so scary how it's not really a boom, but something happends in the middle and then suddenly everything is on fire out of nowhere...and it's over in two seconds, like the fire is seemingly conjured everywhere without a cause
I wanna see movies with more real explosions like that. It would add to the authenticity, and I'd honestly say that it's cooler to see than the just the typical hollywood explosion
There is a trick to getting fuel air explosions to happen quickly, it is called turbulence, this example showed a textbook spherical flamefront indicating no turbulence, putting the ignition source in a large dog kennel or a volume with a relatively small opening or openings would have increased the rate of flamefront growth considerably. Even a house with multiple rooms can greatly increase the peak rate of combustion.
I wonder if the fact that the windows didnt break is as a result of the strength of the walls/roofing, i.e. maybe if they were stronger, the weaker parts (windows) would have given out.
The weakest part is where it broke open it wasn't built to be a home or to last very long perhaps it was just a $h!tty jobsite office building/break room where The windows were just stronger than the quarter inch plywood wall's
Finally someone who thinks the same. I thought I was going crazy...all I could hear with that explosion was Boba Fett's seismic mine from the movies and the game.
@xXx_spaghettilord420_xXx That's what I have always thought when I saw this. They couldn't make really big explosions at this point I think. So it's this weird middle ground of how the pressures change in the house.
All these out of country folks getting salty, one reason why we don't use screws, is that wood expands and contracts, the head of a screw would break off when wood expands. Plus in this video, the room wasn't built to code. Built flimsy.
I think Discovery should release all the episodes of Mythbusters that have not yet made it onto DVDs/Blue Ray. There are so many that are missing: Car Drop, Ultimate Mythbuster, Boarding a Plane, Mythbuster vs Jaws, for just a few. Just give us all the episodes, for pity's sake!
I don’t know how much difference it makes, but anecdotally the really powerful house explosions I’ve heard of involved propane rather than methane, so that could be a big factor in addition to the ratio?
This explosion was so cool you could see the detonation and track it with the naked eye, and it isn't the kind that shatters things into a million pieces it instantly roasts the inside of the apartment in a flash.
Or put your key in the front door when you come home. Folks I worked with lost a trailer like that. The door frame was much stronger than the wall (thank goodness!). The guy picked up some static and it discharged between the key and the lock. Parts of the front wall went out on either side of the door, leaving him holding a key in a lock on a door with a frame and no wall.
+Noahboy03 Von awesome dude LOL! Redefining the term "Natural Gas" since 2015! (After all, natural gas is methane, and methane comes out from "there" as well, among other gasses and chemical compounds)
In Bourne, the scene is set in at a super spy house, armed to the teeth and you can imagine that there are explosives in the apartment, at least grenades. The explosion may have occurred when it took those fires.
The thing about the Bourne method is that it slowly filled up with gas, with an ignition source burning in the toaster. So, you're almost guaranteed to get the minimum (About 5% depending on barometric pressure, humidity...) fuel/air ratio that will burn, not the most efficient.
I love Mythbusters, and watched this episode when it aired. But they missed the boat on this one. There are plenty of cases of houses detonating from Natural Gas leaks. In recent memory, there was one in Pennsylvania, one in North Carolina, Georgia, Chicago... There's even a dashcam video of the one in Pennsylvania. It was not a 'woosh'. It was like a bomb went off. I think this could convince people to be less careful about using Natural Gas. When they absolutely should be.
I'm not surprised. Despite the reputation to the contrary, Adam and Jamie do not exercise due diligence in their experiments. They make a lot of assumptions, and hardly do any research beyond the surface level. The Build Team of Tori, Grant, and Kari was honestly in my opinion much better about testing things in a scientific manner.
I bet if the building was more secure, without just nailing holes with boards, there would be a bigger build up of pressure, causing a bigger release of energy, potentially bursting through the windows, which would be the weakest part of the structure
They should also pump natural gas in there in an endless amount, just like what would happen in a real gas leak. It doesn't stop at "9%". Then if some kind of spark happens AFTER that, then yes, the house will blow up like a bomb. This has happened several times in houses with gas heating.
whoa you can actually watch the gas in the form of a blue flame race out from the ignition source. that may not have been a large boom but it'd be enough to destroy your home
I think that the reason that section of wall blew out might be due to it being where the gas hose entered, which might have caused a higher percentage of methane in that area.
Steel wool and a 9-18v battery Adam! Combustion of paper is slightly inconsistent, like primers in rifle cartridges the variable of how fast and intense the concentration and buildup of energy exponentially increasing or just chemically reacting, that determines the power of the final result, is relative to the energy released by the initial reaction, try a thimble full of nitro glycerin, and add a drop of alcohol for detonation, or place a cut shotgun shell so the primer is exposed, or a firecracker, a real m80, or a propane (MAP gas) torch plasma tube flame popper (high speed) you could use acetylene, and remember it’s the accelerated decomposing of the gas in a high nitrogen (no less than 11% no more than 20% oxygen) atmosphere that makes or breaks the energy delivery of the detonated gas, there is plenty of MSDS scientific data on these gases.
I saw a veterinary clinic vanish into a cloud 300’ in the air (at least half of that) and shatter windows on parked cars storefronts, a school, and damage the front of neighboring homes, as the place came back down to earth, it happened so fast, I glanced at the sudden shadow from the launched vaporized building and had not even processed the visual data as a cloud when my feet shook, then the “WHOOOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!!” Percussion of the explosion was like a hit in the solar plexus, I somehow hit hyperspace and appeared under cover of a safe structure (Not necessarily turned out that I wasn’t in the line of direct impact) but Instinct served me right. I ran over to see what happened and couldn’t figure it out, then I realized there was no longer a building on the corner st all, it was gone!
That mixture was way on the lean side, no where near 9%. Also the building was flimsy and there were not multiple rooms (baffle effect). Believe me real explosions that blow buildings to bits happen from natural gas all the time.
the reason glass didn't shatter is because there was no shockwave. your gas ignited and deflagrated, expanding rapidly enough to tear a hole in the wall. we can clearly see the expansion by the expanding sphere of flame that emanates from the ignition source. it's expanding quickly and with a lot of force, but it's still subsonic. what people tend to think of as an explosion is technicaly a detonation. strictly speaking, this was an explosion, but the one in the movie was a detonation. the reason for this difference is that the movie essentially faked the whole setup. instead of igniting gas under pressure, they ignited some kind of high explosive. generally speaking, gases combust much more slowly than solids and liquids. for that reason, gas needs to be under really immense pressure for it to detonate, irrespective of the concentration, the total amount, or even the ignition source. even if you used a nuclear bomb as a kind of "primer" (lol at that idea) any gas surrounding it still wouldn't actually detonate itself, though it would still probably be pushed away at supersonic speeds before it could even combust. in the film they might still have used a combustible gas, but it definitely wasn't the "primary charge."
That should have been a brick/concrete house. It is the same as well known trick with adding explosives inside pipe - it amplifies, so if exterior is weak so the explosion same weak.
Well I don't know about that but here recently there was a guy who committed suicide by turning on his gas stoves in his house until the house filled up and he ignited it and it blew the house apart all over the neighborhood and took out the side of his neighbor's house ...there was a crater left and pieces of house two blocks away
Should try acetylene and oxygen set to a neutral mixture. It would level that structure from considering what I’ve seen a trash bag full of the mix do.
Look up Richmond Hill Explosion. A couple took out a whole neighborhood in 2012 here in Indianapolis. I don't know what Mythbusters did wrong, but a couple of insurance frauds did better.
I bet if you used liquified gas, had it decompress violently, and then detonated it, it'd blow the entire thing to pieces and shatter every piece of glass there.
