How much energy is in a bottle of compressed air!

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Chickenthief

Chickenthief

Member
Aug 16, 2019
820
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Intoxicated, Denmark
How much energy is in a bottle of air?



9 liter (45min?) at 300 bar = 1,54 Mj (Mega Joule)



How much is a Mj of energy!

Wood = 630-720gram

Straw = 729gram

Coke = 333gram

Gasoline = 23gram

Diesel = 23gram

Propane = 11gram



RDX = 243gram

TNT = 348gram

Dynamite = 190gram

Gunpowder = 250gram



So anything like 243grams of RDX or 11grams of propane to 1,13kg of straw if you utilize all the energy in the bottle down to zero. The slower you go the less it seams, but the compressor sure had to work for it in the other end.



The explosives are dangerous because they react within a split second and thus forms an violent explosion. The rest burns in an orderly manner and energy can be harvested ”fully”.



There is no lifted finger here but do mind filled bottles as they react violently if the valve is torn off. Mythbusters did this and it was bad!



For the Imperial impared please download this little, most helpfull, ”app”

https://joshmadison.com/convert-for-windows/





The WYSIWYG editor is shot to pieces!

"What You See Is What You Get" is way off regarding setting up orderly coloums.

But i susect that folks will get the gest.
 
lol i believe it .. i shot one of those tall metal helium tanks i found dumped out in the woods with a shotgun slug one time .. i thought it was empty but nope .. even though those things weigh about 150 lbs or somethin it spun around about 1000rpm off the ground about 10 ft for what seemed like a full minute .. scared the bejeebus out of me lol ... lucky i didnt die ..
 
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I have a holding tank at my shop that is maybe 500 gallons and gets pressurized to 160psi (11 bar) or so.

I had to add a fitting, so I isolated the tank, and opened a bleed valve. I waited until the rushing sound turned into a barely audible hiss ( I am thinking maybe 10 psi max right?). You know where this story is going haha!

I grabbed my wrench and started to unscrew the NPT (tapered thread) bung. After a few turns it went BANG! and shot the heavy bung right past my torso and into a 55 gallon drum full of machine waste oil. It punched a clean hole into one side, and like a cartoon, the oil was gushing out in this perfect arc. Luckily the hole in the drum was only about a foot down from the top, so "only" about 10 gallons spewed forth. Compressed air is no joke.
 
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We were living on Guam. It was 1957 and my father was learning to SCUBA dive. Yeah, that was a while ago.

One of the divers knocked over his tank and broke the regulator of at the neck of the tank. This was inside a cinder block garage in military housing on Anderson AFB. It went across the garage, through the wall and a quarter of a mile down through the housing area before it hit another garage and went through one wall of that. Nobody was hurt. 


 
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I was in the pressure tank manufacturing business for thirty years and investigated numerous failures (none my own). Several people are killed each year by tank failures, usually these vessels are operating around 100 to 150 psi. The National Board of Pressure Vessel Inspectors documents all of these failures. I investigated the failure of a 5,000 gallon vessel (6’ diameter by 22’ long) that blew up at just over 175 psi, one head (end) knocked down a 6’ block wall, crossed the road a took out a power pole and transformer approximately 125’ away. Luckily nobody injured, there are many much worse..
 
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