Posted on 04/21/2023 11:14:58 AM PDT by nickcarraway
The mystery of the Hindenburg disaster, the destruction of the largest aircraft ever constructed by mankind, on May 6, 1937, in Manchester Township, New Jersey has baffled scientists for decades.
The airship Hindenburg was nearing the end of a three-day voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Frankfurt, Germany before it went up in flames. Merely watching the gigantic airship making its way across the skies was a newsworthy spectacle, and onlookers and news crews gathered to watch the 800-foot-long behemoth touch down.
Suddenly and horrifyingly, in less than half minute, it was all over. Flames erupted from the airship’s skin, fed by the flammable hydrogen gas that kept it aloft, and consumed the entire structure, ending 36 lives.
The ship, already famous before its demise, was seared into the world’s memory.
Greek scientist Hindenburg Public Domain The disaster, despite having occurred nearly one hundred years ago, has remained one of the iconic tragedies of the 20th century alongside other accidents that captured the public’s imagination, such as the sinking of the Titanic, the Challenger explosion, and the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
Grecian Delight supports Greece Greek scientist unravels the cause of the Hindenburg explosion But what was the cause of the explosion? Caltech’s Konstantinos Giapis, a professor of chemical engineering, recreated the ship’s final moments and unraveled its secrets for NOVA, the popular PBS science television show.
Giapis, who obtained his diploma from the National Technical University of Athens in 1984 and completed his Ph.D. studies at the University of Minnesota in 1989, began looking into historical records of the accident and soon realized that no one before had undertaken any form of research to discover the cause of the incident.
What has always been known is that the zeppelin, which was designed by the Zeppelin Company, a German firm known for its large and luxurious airships, contained 7 million cubic feet of flammable hydrogen.
Imagine a cigar-shaped balloon as large as a skyscraper filled with explosive gas. Combine that hydrogen with oxygen from the air and a source of ignition, and you “literally [have] a bomb,” Giapis said, according to an interview with Caltech.
The key but long-unanswered question was how the fire even began. The Greek scientist built a model of a portion of the zeppelin’s outer surface in his laboratory on the Caltech campus in his attempt to gain insights.
Greek scientist Hindenburg disaster The Hindenburg flying over New York City just before disaster struck. Public Domain Building a model of the Hindenburg airship The Greek scientist attests that after the ship was grounded, it became more electrically charged. When the mooring ropes were dropped, electrons from Earth’s surface spread to the frame, giving the ship a positively-charged skin and a negatively-charged frame.
In other words, by grounding the frame with the mooring ropes, the landing crew had inadvertently made more “room” for positive charge to gather on the ship, setting the stage for the disaster.
“When you ground the frame, you form a capacitor—one of the simplest electric devices for storing electricity—and that means you can accumulate more charge from the outside,” Giapis says. “I did some calculations and I found that it would take four minutes to charge a capacitor of this size!”
With the ship now acting as a giant capacitor, enough electrical energy to produce the powerful sparks required for igniting the hydrogen gas could be acquired. This, based on eyewitness accounts, may have been leaking from the rear end of the ship located near its tail.
“Hydrogen was leaking at one specific location in this humongous thing. If there is a spark somewhere else on the ship, there is no way you would ignite a leak hundreds of feet away. A charge could move on wet skin over short distances, but doing that from the front of the airship all the way to the back is more difficult,” he says. “So how did the spark find this leak?”
Any place where a part of the frame was in close proximity to the skin would have formed a capacitor, and there were hundreds of these places all over the ship, Giapis says.
“That means the giant capacitor was actually composed of multiple smaller capacitors, each capable of creating its own spark. So I believe there were multiple sparks happening all over the ship, including where the leak was,” he says.
Giapis’ work could help exploration of Mars The Greek scientist was also the head of a team of US scientists which has developed a small, portable device that can generate oxygen from carbon dioxide.
His brilliant idea could become the foundation of future human missions to Mars, as it could provide breathable oxygen to astronauts who will travel on long space missions to reach the Red Planet.
After completing his Ph.D. studies at the University of Minnesota in 1989, Giapis was employed as a Lacey Instructor in Caltech between 1992 and 1993; as an assistant professor between 1993 and 1998; and an associate professor between 1999 and 2010. Since 2010, he has worked as a professor at Caltech.
He is currently teaching Chemical Engineering Design Laboratory and Heterogeneous Kinetics and Reaction Engineering at Caltech.
Interesting. Another piece of the puzzle. Remember that the big highly visible flames are not from hydrogen as much as they are from the aluminum powder and lacquer mixture used to “dope” the cloth skin.
The disaster is easy to explain:
2 H2 + O2 => 2 H2O plus a whole lot of energy in a very easy to start reaction.
I thought Mythbusters solved this 16 years ago?
https://www.discovery.com/shows/mythbusters/episodes/hindenburg-mystery
Hard to believe it wasn’t climate change...
Just don’t let Lucy Preston go back and rescue a passenger who is not supposed to survive.
I’ve had a hunch it was Jersians getting even with the Germans over the Black Tom bombing during WW1.
Something still has to start that combustion.
You mean this wasn’t Trumps fault?!
Maybe you should re-read the article?
BTW, unlike First World War era Zeppelins, the Hindenburg was designed to use helium. But only the USA had a lot of helium and FDR considered it a strategic recourse. So no sale to Nazi Germany.
But Hitler felt he needed the PR of the world's largest airship, so he ordered it to go ahead with hydrogen. And it made several trips with no mishaps.
So a spark in the center fuel tank?
Static electric shock, in a nutshell. A little more complex than that, but like touching something that is more grounded than you.
Was there something unique about this particular landing?
In other words, why had this kind of accident not happened before?
Were hydrogen leaks that rare?
Can we look forward to being passed by blazing hydrogen powered cars on our local expressways?
Who did she rescue?
Every so often work with helicopters and a sling cable.
“And whatever you do - let the cable touch the ground first before you grab it!”
I was told the cable as it flies through the air picks up static electricity. I wonder why the helicopter doesn’t become a “giant capacitor”? Maybe the cable is insulated from the helicopter?
I have never understood the incredible preoccupation with the Hindenburg. Very few people died in the tragedy, but because it was a spectacular explosion of a huge 800’ long airship caught on camera, it has spurred countless books, films, speculation, etc. I have been a huge airship buff all my life. There were far more tragic and fascinating crashes involving British and American dirigibles and they do not engender near the interest.
Why is the subject buried so far down in the narrative? Why can’t people who write put the subject right into the first sentence or paragraph and fill in the fluff later? PS: It’s been know for decades that it was static electricity that set off the explosion.
Maybe, but that knowledge hasn’t made it’s way to Greece.
Right! The Greek did nothing more than fill in minor details ie capacitor theory - Static electricity was proven long ago to be the culprit about which the Greek uses fancy words to obscure.
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