Safety

[Gideon]

Hi,
Im Gideon and Im 15 years old. Ive build my own turbine engine. A very simple one, but it works. the only problem is, my parents are concerned about the my safety while runiing the engine. offcourse there are some dangerous things which could happen.
My dad is mostly concerned about the flame jumping back into the propanebottle, i allready explained that this situation is unlikely to happen. but he will probably wont let me run my engine again...
can anybody help me with my problem ( my parents;) ) or give me advise of how to protect myself and the engine as good as possible. How to make sure the propane bottle wont get me in any trouble.... by exploding.... which would not be so nice ;)

hopefully you can give me some advice
Greets
Gideon... ( sorry for my bad english ..i live in The Netherlands )

[multispool]

Hi Gideon,
Go to the GTBA website http://www.gtba.co.uk and download the turbine safety codes, they are also available in Dutch and German but not to sure how good the translations are!

[Fricke]

Hi Gideon -

Have a look at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DIYGasTurbines/join. Join the group and there are many members that run off propane and as far as I know they are still around ;)

Have a look at a caravan or boat store they usually have parts for propane installations in caravans and boats ant if I remember correctly there should be some form of flame arrestor.

But as long as there is pressure in the bottle there will be no risk of a flame travelling back in to it.

//Fredrik

[El-Kablooey]

Propane cannot burn without LOTS of air. There is no chance of a flame travelling up your line because there is no air in there, only propane. You could install a spark plug in the side of an LP tank and let it spark away and nothing would happen. The only way you could cause an explosion is by heating the bottle until it ruptured from the pressure.

[luc]

Propane cannot burn without LOTS of air. There is no chance of a flame travelling up your line because there is no air in there, only propane. You could install a spark plug in the side of an LP tank and let it spark away and nothing would happen. The only way you could cause an explosion is by heating the bottle until it ruptured from the pressure.

Exactly ...

Futhermore, what mix-up peoples when they wittness a propane bottle blowing up, is that their eyes is not fast enough to see the real process going on. The only thing they see is a big ball of fire and then, they go on saying ... "Hoo god, the bottle blew up" ... Which is totally wrong.

Like El-Kablooey said, the only time where you will see this happen is if you heat up the bottle. But even then, you will not wittness an explosion (meaning Fire Ball) but a burst cause by excess pressure. The propane will ONLY catch in flame when it will reach a ratio between 6:1 to 21:1 of propane/air mixture and IFFFFFF ... There is a flame near by. If there are no flame near, you will only see and hear a big bang, trow a shit load of propane in the atmosphere and screw-up our ozone layer.

Take us for example, everyday we play with pressure jets, which vaporize pure liquid propane into pure vapor propane and shoots it straight into tubes full of air and into a 3600 °F burning combustion chamber. If your father was correct in his assumptions, flame would travel back all the way to our nozzle, burn into the tubes and kill our engine, which is not the case since they run well.

Evenmore, if he was correct, flame would travel back into the nozzle, the fuel lines, which are connected straight to a 500 gallon propane tank, which is actually near full. So, if he was correct, I would not be writting now, the shop would be gone, my house, the neighbors and I would probaly still be flying near mach 2 and straight to the moon.

No ... There are really no problems with your test. Tell your father on my behaft, that to create an explosion, it take fuel, air and sparks, which 2 of them are missing in his assumptions.

Don't run after trouble taught ... Don't sit your fuel tank on the turbine or straight behind the exhaust. Just keep your fuel tank a few feet from the turbine and on the intake side and tell your father not to worry. Instead, ask him to be your fire officer with an extinguisher in its hand. This way, him too will learn alot.

Regards,

Luc

[Anders Troberg]

In my home town, a drunk train driver managed to derail a trainload of propane. I think it was 5 or 6 carriages of propane that went off the track. Luckily, they did not burst, as that could have become a huge fuel-air bomb that could have leveled the city.

However, they did not want to try to get them back on track while full. What they did was to cut a hole in them (which I think they did using a plasma cutter in some kind of enclosed environment, for some reason there was no close-up pictures :-) ), then attach a tube and burn off the gas 50-100 meters away.

If you can do that when an entire town is at stake (a similar incident happened in Democratic People's Republic of Korea, but the propane tanks burst at the crash and more or less wiped out a nearby city), it should be pretty safe.

Tell your father that a 15 year old that is smart enough to build a working turbine engine (and that's probably a lot) is smart enough to handle it safely.