The Hindenburg....

bonkey

I got this article from teh end of another one, on some website I cant remember (hencv me posting this, rather than a link). I thought it made interesting reading...

Everyone knows that the Hindenburg burned and crashed because it was full of hydrogen. According to Addison Bain, everyone is wrong.

On May 6, 1937, dirigible LZ 129—popularly known as the Hindenburg—burst into flames over Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 35 of the 97 people aboard. German and American investigators publicly concluded that the hydrogen that provided the craft's lift caused the disaster. Today hydrogen-fuel advocates point to the Hindenburg as the biggest obstacle to acceptance of their schemes. "A whole generation grew up with that newsreel image of the flaming Hindenburg etched on their memories," says Amory Lovins.

Bain, formerly NASA's hydrogen program manager, has spent a decade unraveling the Hindenburg disaster. He contends the craft's five-coat paint job was the culprit. The compounds saturating the cotton-cloth exterior were extremely combustible: a layer of iron oxide covered with four coats of cellulose butyrate acetate mixed with powdered aluminum. "The fuel of solid rockets, such as that used in the shuttle's boosters, has a very similar composition," says Bain. "The Hindenburg was literally painted with rocket fuel."

Bain's theory: In the stormy atmosphere, static charges built up on the ship's aluminum frame and its cloth covering. When crew members dropped the landing ropes, which were tied to the frame, the ropes got wet and were transformed into a conduit for the charge on the frame. The charge surged to the ground, which created an enormous differential between the charges on the frame and the cloth covering. As a result of that differential, the electrons flowing within the cloth cover grew so excited that they caused the aluminum powder to react with other chemicals in the paint, causing a fire. That fire moved violently across the craft's skin, spreading to the 16 hydrogen-gas-filled cells that packed the ship's interior.

Had the fire started with hydrogen, says Bain, "you would have seen a plume of fire ejected from the craft that was nearly colorless." Hydrogen fire emits light mainly in the ultraviolet spectrum, which makes it nearly invisible in daylight, but witnesses described the flames as "highly colorized."

While German authorities insisted officially that hydrogen was the culprit, Bain's analysis of sample material from its sister airship, the Graf Zeppelin II, built at the time of the Hindenburg accident, indicates that they suspected the real cause. The builders added a fireproofing agent called calcium sulfamate to the paint mixture on the Graf Zeppelin II and replaced aluminum with heavier but less-combustible bronze. Bain believes German investigators suppressed the true story out of embarrassment over having used such a hazardous substance to coat the ill-fated Hindenburg.

jc

WhiteWashMan

thats really cool.
i wish id kept up physics in college.
but that article is really interesting.

smoke.me.a.kipper

very interesting article. made good reading.