Talk:3016: Cold Air

Back In The Day, one of the idiot youngsters in a first-year chemistry lab, before leaving at the end of the afternoon, connected a water faucet to a natural-gas line (used for Bunsen burners) with a rubber hose, and opened both taps. By the next morning, much of the natural-gas network in the heart of the city was flooded. It took a while to get everything working again, and the cleanup wasn't cheap. BunsenH (talk) 22:50, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

You have the right username to mention this! ;)

Also, the 'big trick', back in my day, was to be at the (correct end of) the science-lab bench and briefly blow into a pipe (temporarily unplugged from the burner) just as you turn your tap on. Then watch as the rest of the row (downstream of your connection to the supply) have their active flames go out. ...but I leave it to your imagination the three main problems (and various other less major ones) with trying that, with the benefit of hindsight. 172.69.195.201 00:02, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Anyone understand the physics here? It seems clear that adding tanks of cool, dry air will make storms (and particularly tornados) far worse, not better, as the incoming hot, wet air will react with any released air to make even worse/dramatic weather patterns. But is there more to it? If the tanks are sealed, then effect could be muted by simply not releasing the stored air once the problem is realized, but this would be countered by at least two factors: First, the title text indicates that an additonal error was made resulting in it beingg impossible to seal the stored air completely (it escapes through the water system). But also, any time weather got bad enough to open leaks in the system, I think this would produce a catastrophic result as the storm mixed with all the cold dry air at once? Mneme (talk) 23:01, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

My understanding is generally that explosive failure of a container with sufficient "anti-tornado" air inside is going to be non-trivial (and you face this threat constantly, in the settlement that has an "air tower", whereas tornados are relatively infrequent and mostly cross countryside). post-edit: And the editor who set up the current explanation seems to have had much the same idea... gratifying to know I'm on the same wavelength as at least one person!

And the water-connection would be bad due to (first) extremely pressurised water and (immediately afterwards) almost as pressurised air pushing through the areas plumbing systems, with unknown secondary effects such as effectively blowing empty any water-heaters that really shouldn't be left to be 'boiled dry' (after enough air bubbles in, the remaining water will soak up the burner heat and evaporate beyond design limitations, adding to the gas pressure and no longer moderating the effects on the boiler body itself; not sure exactly what will go wrong, but it may not be pretty). 172.69.195.201 00:02, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Without knowing which 'city' the diagram might be of (or, indeed, how figurative Cueball's illustrative figure might be), I checked the first "tornado alley" city I could think of and came up with One Kansas City Place as how tall the taller buildings might be. In that case, just shy of 200m (with spire on top) and 40-odd floors. The dimensions of the 3000psi tank (external, but ignoring support infrastructure) is somewhere around 400m in height, perhaps 600m side to side, presumably oblate spheroidal, so approaching (less thickness of container walls) 75 million m³ of compressed air. Which is compressed, and would otherwise be around 15,000 million m³ (15 km³!) of atmosphere if ever released. As a very vague upper limit. Notwithstanding the apparent use of an existing (ex-)water-tower in the titletext. But obviously there's possibly abstract and definitely reinterpretable alternative interpretations of the quantities that might be involved. 172.69.195.225 00:48, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

It seems that the wiki math package

<math> </math>

Does not work properly, and returns an error Failed to parse

(Missing <code>texvc</code> executable. Please see math/README to configure.):

when I attempted to add the math describing the speed of the air using LaTeX 172.68.22.92 01:06, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

This is a long-standing error (at some point, one bit of update invalidated the rendering process, and nobody is currently able to update the other component/configuration).

There are plenty of alternate ways to format a newly needed formula, without TeX, and anything that's the same as when it was pre-rendered will continue to show as the inline "formula image" (which I think is potentially worse, anyway, when it comes to accessibility issues). It's really not too hard to do it without the math-tag extension working properly, though. e.g.

p1•v1	=	p2•v2
t1		t2

...as quick example with just a little bit of fine tuning applied. 172.70.160.134 01:44, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

The statement that 3000PSI is 6x higher than known high pressure systems is false. Scuba tanks contain air at this pressure (240bar/3000psi) and the systems used to fill scuba tanks are twice that. 172.71.26.101 (talk) 09:28, 26 November 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Perform the wiki magic and add that source!--FrankHightower (talk) 15:04, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

My calculator (Google) says 400MPH is 644 KPH (not 500). Also 40 Bar seems to be well on the high side of 500psi (580psi).

"winds of about 40-400 mph [1] (about 50-500 kph)" "about 40 bar [2] (about 500 psi)."

--PRR (talk) 01:11, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

The source says tornadoes go up to 318 mph (512 kph) but the strongest tornado on record exceeded that. I couldn't confirm when I wrote whether that was actually the strongest, and since the only purpose of the number is to say "Cueball's windspeeds are way, way worse", I decided an upper bound of 400 covered it.--FrankHightower (talk) 15:04, 26 November 2024 (UTC)