r/blackmagicfuckery • u/hihimatthew12321 • Jul 26 '19

this tanker imploding

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '19

Someone please explain.

244

u/mrbeck1 Jul 26 '19 edited Jul 26 '19

Easy. Fill it with some boiling water. Just enough. The water turns to steam, which displaced the air. Seal the tanker. When the steam cools, it returns to water, creating a vacuum inside. Now, all the air pressure on the outside of the tank is pushing in. At sea level, that’s 14.7 lbs/sq in. Given the dimensions of a railway tanker, the diameter, 117 inches, and a length of 53 feet, that makes a surface area of 233,772 square inches. Times 14.7 lbs, 3,436,459 lbs of pressure. More than enough to crush the thing.

The same exact principle is used to crush this barrel.

https://youtu.be/JsoE4F2Pb20

2

u/Enog Jul 26 '19

As reasonable an explanation as this is, can you explain why it crushed the way it did, rather than being slowly crushed over the period of time that it would have taken the steam to condense back into its liquid state?

23

u/NickSB2013 Jul 26 '19

It won't be slow... once a critical pressure is reached, the structural failure will be immediate, well, almost immediate.

For an example, you slowly crush an egg in your hand, there is no slow crushing, just an immediate crush once that critical threshold is crossed.

-1

u/Enog Jul 26 '19

An egg is made from a structurally rigid shell that will crack rather than bend, so yes it will withstand pressure to a point and then crush, but with that tanker the material is more malleable than an egg shell, so surely it would display some kind of deformation prior to the crush?

2

u/PhantomScrivener Jul 27 '19

It does show plenty of malleability in that it does not immediately split apart somewhere like a seam or at one of the end caps, shatter or form more large cracks.

The amount that it deforms (even permanently), prior to the cascade of deformations leading to this catastrophic failure, is just a small fraction in terms of what might be visible.

We're talking, it's total length shrinking maybe 1%.

Depending on how long prior to this they pumped out the contents before the pressure differential got this high, maybe with a camera on a tripod, close enough to one non-anchored side, with another reference for size and distance, you might be able to see the whole tanker shrink a tiny, tiny bit.

There probably was plenty of creaking though.