An Oxyliquit, also called liquid air explosive or liquid oxygen explosive, is an explosive material which is a mixture of liquid oxygen (LOX) with a suitable fuel, such as carbon (as lampblack), or an organic chemical (e.g. a mixture of soot and naphthalene), wood meal, or aluminium powder or sponge. It is a class of Sprengel explosives.
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Oxyliquits have numerous advantages. They are inexpensive to make, can be initiated by a safety fuse, and in case of a misfire, the oxygen evaporates quickly, rendering the charge quite safe in a short period of time. The first large scale deployment took place in during the building of the Simplon Tunnel, in the form of cartridges filled with diatomaceous earth soaked with petroleum, or an absorbent cork charcoal, dipped in liquid oxygen immediately before use. In another modification, the cartridge is filled with liquid oxygen after placement in the borehole.
One of the disadvantages of oxyliquits is that, once mixed, they are sensitive to sparks, shock, and heat, in addition to reported cases of spontaneous ignition. The power relative to weight is high, but the density is low, so the brisance is low as well. Ignition by a fuse alone is sometimes unreliable. The charge should be detonated within 5 minutes of soaking, but even after 15 minutes it may be capable of exploding, even though weaker and with production of carbon dioxide.
An oxyliquit explosion can be accidentally produced while filling high-altitude aircraft systems. When liquid oxygen is spilled on tarmac (asphalt) the pavement can become sufficiently explosive to be set off simply by walking on it, even though the oxygen evaporates shortly after it is spilled.[citation needed]
At first, liquid air, self-enriched by standing (nitrogen has a lower boiling point and evaporates preferentially) was used, but pure liquid oxygen gives better results.
A mixture of lampblack and liquid oxygen was measured to have a detonation velocity of 3,000 m/s, and 4 to 12% more explosive power than dynamite. The long duration of the flame it produced, however, made it unsafe for use in the presence of explosive gases. Therefore, oxyliquits were mostly used in open quarries and strip mines.
The explosive properties of these mixtures were discovered in Germany in by Prof. Carl von Linde, a developer of a successful machine for liquefaction of gases, who named them oxyliquits.
In , over 3 million pounds (1.4×10^6 kg) of liquid oxygen were used for this purpose in Germany alone, and additional 201,466 lb (91,383 kg) were consumed by British quarries. The accident rate was lower than with conventional explosives. However, the Dewar flasks the LOX was stored in occasionally exploded, which was caused by iron impurities in the activated carbon serving as trace gas absorbent in the insulation vacuum layer in the flask, which caused spontaneous ignition in case of LOX leak into the enclosed space.
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Use of oxyliquits during World War II was low, as there was a plentiful supply of nitrates obtained from synthetic ammonia.
Due to the complicated machinery required for manufacture of liquid oxygen, oxyliquit explosives were used mostly only where their consumption was high. In the United States, some such locations were the strip mines in coal mining areas of the Midwest. Its consumption peaked in with 10,190 tons[vague], but then decreased to zero in , when it was entirely replaced with the cheaper ANFO.
Oxyliquit explosive was prepared ad hoc from sugar and liquid oxygen from an oxygen bottle to blast a hole in a collapsed cave in Stanisław Lem's novel The Astronauts. The same device was used in Andy Weir's novel The Martian and the movie adaptation to cause the intentional depressurization of a spaceship by blasting the airlock door.
Nitrogen is a chemical element that has multiple uses, both in elemental form in the gaseous state, in the liquid state, or in the diversity of compounds that can be synthesized from it. Its use in liquid form has its advantages which are related to the specific field where it is applied, while its disadvantages are more homogeneous and depend on the intrinsic properties of having a gaseous compound under pressure and temperature conditions so that it is in liquid form.
Regardless of their advantages and disadvantages, many technological processes will continue to use liquid nitrogen, because its performance makes it difficult to find a substitute that will compete with their abundance and price. As a result, large food and beverage industries, genomics and proteomics laboratories, and chemical and physics laboratories will continue to use liquid nitrogen routinely.
To maintain the nitrogen in the liquid state, special conditions and containers are required. Handling this substance, which has a temperature below -190°C, requires all safety standards to avoid burns. Nor can the container in which it is stored be hermetically sealed, as it risks exploding due to the expansion that involves changing from liquid to gaseous state, so that it cannot be stored for a long period of time. Given these difficult ideas, the disadvantages of nitrogen can be summarized as follows:
Consequently, the economic cost and the risks to the safety of users and storage spaces are the main drawbacks. But liquid nitrogen has properties that make it desirable for work in various fields. The first advantage it has is its non-reactivity, although this is true only under ordinary conditions. As in the above case, each benefit is described as follows:
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