http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=72e_1208694365
We’ve all seen pics of this, now we have video!
Not sure if the means used is a pump to evacuate the chamber, but text says its the old high school science class technic of heating the interior, sealing it and letting it cool down, same result:
KABOOM!..or in this case, !MOOBAK.
I think the nearly instantaneous failure is what surprises me the most. I had always pictured such a collapse as a relatively slow process.
[#ditto] That surprised me, too. I had envisioned a process that tooks hours or even days. It’s kind of a dramatic reaction!
I also expected it to take a bit longer than this, but I guess the car structure (that’s pretty thick steel, after all) offers some resistance before the difference in pressure just becomes too much.
Don’t know if it makes any difference, but that car doesn’t look like a North American prototype.
Wouldn’t that make a tremendous noise?
It’s German, EVA = Eisenbahn Verkehrsmittel Aktiengesellschaft (and taken over I think by VTG, another German tankcar leasing company) and we probably see only the last few seconds of e test / demonstration.
greetings,
Marc Immeker
Most tank cars have safety valves to relieve the pressure if too much builds up inside the tank (most tanks are designed to withstand a certain amount of pressure, and this is shown in the tank specification at the right end of the tank body–for example, a DOT-111A100W1 car has a tank designed to handle 100 pounds of pressure, and cars for chlorine can handle up to 500 pounds).
So why not put a reverse-acting safety valve in the car as well, to protect a rather pricey investment? For the idiots who can’t “vent tank before unloading”, it could be made to sound like a whoopee cushion!
[(-D]
im sure you all have seen the other post floating around…ill let someone else do all the cuttin’ and pastin’
Must show Driver what might happen if I do vacuum…
Darn it beat me to it by 30 minutes!
I think they were doing failure testing because there was a crowd of onlookers.
That being said, steel actually flexes very little. In engineering we express this as mm/mm KPa. But it’s more like how many um/mm KPa. That means for every kPa how many micormeteres will 1 mm of steel contract/expand. It’s a very tiny number.
It’s rated capacity it typically the elastic yield (where the steel will return to it’s original dimensions after the load is relieved). Go beyond that and the tank is pretty much ruined as it will be perma stretched even after load is removed. Then it fails at ultimate yield.
The voice in German says 760. Don’t know what it means. Minutes? Pressure?
greetings,
Marc Immeker
Several years ago there was an e-mail picture of a DuPont tank car that had had a vacuum ‘implosion’ making the rounds. While we would like to think that the employees in chemical plants are highly skilled and highly trained…not all the employees are Einstein’s and not all are as trained or skilled as their bosses would like to think they are.
Murphy’s laws still apply…
Please, for everyone’s sake, do vent before unloading on him!