Captain Jonah
Mongoose
The fact that you can store larger volumes of H by filling your tanks with ammonia has been covered many times before but we will stick with just pure H as this is Traveller.
Please note all values given are approximate for the article so please don’t get picky because I have rounded any values, also I have been unable (despite my Google Foo) to find any actual cases of people standing next to a breached liquid H tanks so this is all based on separate reports and theories. No comments about pseudo science please :roll:
Presuming that you are just using hydrogen cooled to the point it liquefies you are talking about -250 C or -420F. Interestingly the liquid range for H is very small so keeping H a liquid requires careful control, 10 degrees colder and it will become a solid, 10 degrees hotter and it’s a rapidly expanding gas.
Storing it under pressure changes these values but we can assume here cryonic storage only.
A cubic metre of Liquid H is 70KG, a Dton is 980KG. A cubic metre of Gas H is 0.08, a Dton is 1.12KG.
So a Dton of liquid H exposed to room temperatures will expand 875 fold. In the question given 20Dton of liquid H fuel will fill 17,500Dtons as a gas. Basically that’s every where in the ship not protected by a bulkhead or hatch of some kind. 1Dton of liquid H that boils to gas as a result of contacting room temperate will fill a liner if the doors are all open.
Now as to the effects. You are looking at cryonic temperatures. As in cryonic freezing/liquid nitrogen levels. The H will be warming up but because it goes gaseous after such a small temperature increase you will be looking at a rapidly expanding cloud that is still super cold. In fact the ships ambient temperature is unlikely to do much to warm the gas beyond the boil off point as the room temperature will rapidly drop and a ships life support will take probably hours to handle such low temperatures.
Exposure temperatures are so low that details such as frost bite are not really a problem since the extremely low temperature means that the human body isn’t going to have time to start the usual responses to cold that lead to hyperthermia.
Direct exposure to venting fuel is not going to be like getting frost burns from touching the outside of the fuel tanks, it is going to be a magnitude worse that Arctic explorers who fall into the arctic waters at -50.
Exposed tissue/skin will freeze, from the outside in causing massive damage as ice crystals form within the tissue, expanding, preventing fluid flow and literally killing the tissue in place. If the person is wearing insulated clothing and the exposure is brief enough they may just lose their face and hands due to tissue necrosis though as long as they don’t inhale the gas they may retain enough of a core body temperature to survive. Very brief contact will most likely be treatable much like severe second or third degree frostbite however since its an expanding cloud of invisible gas exposures are likely to be more than a few seconds unless you react fast to the warnings and alarms.
Inhaling the gas at such low temperatures will destroy the lungs as the Scillia freeze and a person would lose so much core temperature that they would more or less go straight in to hydrothermal shock. Oddly the rapid temperature drop helps to preserve the brain from damage caused by the lack of oxygen so if you can get the person into an autodoc fast they should suffer minimal brain damage if you can get oxygenated blood into them fast enough to compensate for no lungs.
You would need to talk to someone who deals with such matters but I suspect that the expansion rate is not going to be that fast due to the fact that exposure to the liquid H will very quickly drop the local temperate slowing the boil off of the fuel. It may be like the scene from the day after tomorrow where the characters see a line of frost moving quickly across the flour and walls. Time enough to run away or slam hatches.
That’s just for the extreme cold and presuming that the Liquid H is not pressurised. If the liquid H is under any sort of compression then the leak is going to happen much faster, the boil off will be in a much larger area and you could lose your entire engineering crew in one go.
Next problem. H in its gaseous form when mixed with a little O is very combustible and a few sparks from a ruptured power line caused by whatever damage released the fuel in the first place and cold is no longer an issue. A fuel leak could very easily result in an explosion and fire that would gut a compartment. Bear in mind that internal ships walls cannot withstand explosions or fire, only hull or bulkheads will provide safety.
Releasing a vast amount of H into the atmosphere also brings the danger of asphyxiation though if you collapse inside a cloud of minus a few hundred degree gas it will not be suffocation that kills you.
So a leak of liquid H into your ship is not going to be fun. Internal fuel pipes are likely to be triple walled, self sealing and tucked inside the ships hull or bulkheads. Having a breach into a cargo hold is likely to kill anyone trapped in there though sealed cargo containers that can survive vacuum will be fine.
Engineers in shirt sleeves who suffer a breach and cannot get out fast enough would have a very low survival chance.
Moral of this. Wear vac suits or be the other side of a bulkhead when doing anything with liquid H :lol:
Please note all values given are approximate for the article so please don’t get picky because I have rounded any values, also I have been unable (despite my Google Foo) to find any actual cases of people standing next to a breached liquid H tanks so this is all based on separate reports and theories. No comments about pseudo science please :roll:
Presuming that you are just using hydrogen cooled to the point it liquefies you are talking about -250 C or -420F. Interestingly the liquid range for H is very small so keeping H a liquid requires careful control, 10 degrees colder and it will become a solid, 10 degrees hotter and it’s a rapidly expanding gas.
Storing it under pressure changes these values but we can assume here cryonic storage only.
A cubic metre of Liquid H is 70KG, a Dton is 980KG. A cubic metre of Gas H is 0.08, a Dton is 1.12KG.
So a Dton of liquid H exposed to room temperatures will expand 875 fold. In the question given 20Dton of liquid H fuel will fill 17,500Dtons as a gas. Basically that’s every where in the ship not protected by a bulkhead or hatch of some kind. 1Dton of liquid H that boils to gas as a result of contacting room temperate will fill a liner if the doors are all open.
Now as to the effects. You are looking at cryonic temperatures. As in cryonic freezing/liquid nitrogen levels. The H will be warming up but because it goes gaseous after such a small temperature increase you will be looking at a rapidly expanding cloud that is still super cold. In fact the ships ambient temperature is unlikely to do much to warm the gas beyond the boil off point as the room temperature will rapidly drop and a ships life support will take probably hours to handle such low temperatures.
Exposure temperatures are so low that details such as frost bite are not really a problem since the extremely low temperature means that the human body isn’t going to have time to start the usual responses to cold that lead to hyperthermia.
Direct exposure to venting fuel is not going to be like getting frost burns from touching the outside of the fuel tanks, it is going to be a magnitude worse that Arctic explorers who fall into the arctic waters at -50.
Exposed tissue/skin will freeze, from the outside in causing massive damage as ice crystals form within the tissue, expanding, preventing fluid flow and literally killing the tissue in place. If the person is wearing insulated clothing and the exposure is brief enough they may just lose their face and hands due to tissue necrosis though as long as they don’t inhale the gas they may retain enough of a core body temperature to survive. Very brief contact will most likely be treatable much like severe second or third degree frostbite however since its an expanding cloud of invisible gas exposures are likely to be more than a few seconds unless you react fast to the warnings and alarms.
Inhaling the gas at such low temperatures will destroy the lungs as the Scillia freeze and a person would lose so much core temperature that they would more or less go straight in to hydrothermal shock. Oddly the rapid temperature drop helps to preserve the brain from damage caused by the lack of oxygen so if you can get the person into an autodoc fast they should suffer minimal brain damage if you can get oxygenated blood into them fast enough to compensate for no lungs.
You would need to talk to someone who deals with such matters but I suspect that the expansion rate is not going to be that fast due to the fact that exposure to the liquid H will very quickly drop the local temperate slowing the boil off of the fuel. It may be like the scene from the day after tomorrow where the characters see a line of frost moving quickly across the flour and walls. Time enough to run away or slam hatches.
That’s just for the extreme cold and presuming that the Liquid H is not pressurised. If the liquid H is under any sort of compression then the leak is going to happen much faster, the boil off will be in a much larger area and you could lose your entire engineering crew in one go.
Next problem. H in its gaseous form when mixed with a little O is very combustible and a few sparks from a ruptured power line caused by whatever damage released the fuel in the first place and cold is no longer an issue. A fuel leak could very easily result in an explosion and fire that would gut a compartment. Bear in mind that internal ships walls cannot withstand explosions or fire, only hull or bulkheads will provide safety.
Releasing a vast amount of H into the atmosphere also brings the danger of asphyxiation though if you collapse inside a cloud of minus a few hundred degree gas it will not be suffocation that kills you.
So a leak of liquid H into your ship is not going to be fun. Internal fuel pipes are likely to be triple walled, self sealing and tucked inside the ships hull or bulkheads. Having a breach into a cargo hold is likely to kill anyone trapped in there though sealed cargo containers that can survive vacuum will be fine.
Engineers in shirt sleeves who suffer a breach and cannot get out fast enough would have a very low survival chance.
Moral of this. Wear vac suits or be the other side of a bulkhead when doing anything with liquid H :lol:
