>> ^MycroftHomlz:
What he said... except the part about asphyxiation.
You have be in basically a sealed off room to die from helium. I have been working for cryogens for 9 years, and while I have always heard you can die from the gas it is a little ridiculous with helium. It is lighter than air so it will float to the top of the room and escape to the atmosphere.
Maybe us physics people are crazy, or it is the physical size of our magnets, or we just know how to fix them when they go bad... but I always just ramp the temperature when I want to kill the field. And you can ramp the current to change the field. This I have done.


Thing is, its not just helium thats doing the cooling.
A lot of MRI's also use Nitrogen to mediate the temperature between the helium / wire, and helium / atmosphere barrier to prevent cracks in the containment chamber, and unwanted condensation near the electronics.

If a quench occurs, it will release both gasses into the room in the event of a ventilation failure. If you enter the MRI room without leaving the door open, the pressure differential created by the quench can create enough force on the door to prevent you from opening it, causing you to be stuck in a room with a quickly diminishing supply of O2.

Thus...you die.

Always leave the door open when you are using the room.

I was thinking the same thing... give the poor fella a chair and O2.

I'm not disputing that it might be useful to turn water into
hydrogen and oxygen for ease of transport and use, but one
main corollary of thermodynamics is that "there ain't no free
lunch". Even if this was electrolysis via RF (which I doubt;
look at the miniscule bubbles - they can't support that size
flame) and was 100 percent efficient, all you've done is converted
the electrical energy into chemical energy. This is measured
in one way by Gibbs free energy for 2H2O -> 2H2 + O2, what
one could call "the integrity of the water molecule", which
is really the difference in free energy of the bonds in
water and the gases 2H2 and O2. What it looks like to me
is similar to what happens when you put a candle in a microwave
oven. Check out these videos:

and

The first shows the plasma can be initiated on the smoke alone,
while the second shows the plasma dissociated from the flame once
it gets started. I think that what is happening in this saltwater
situation is a little salty water is ejected from the tube which
then starts a plasma going, which is constrained to appear as a flame
because the RF is restricted to the area above the tube, rather
than the whole cavity of a microwave, where the plasma can rise to the
top of the inverted glass.

The visible pressure wave extending outwards is very low and very high pressured air, born of the rapid displacement of atmosphere occurring as the cloud of explosive propellant is ignited. The rapid displacement of air molecules 'ripples' through the atmosphere in three dimensions, with this pressurized-air wave ramming into and reflecting off of things as the energy is disbursed outwards. It might be conceptually helpful to think of the atmosphere as a fluid, and continue with that 'ripple' and 'wave crashing' analogy, but in three dimensions.

I'm not exactly sure, though, how much atmospheric oxygen these beasts would eat up, as I don't know their size or what the explosive is (though that first cloud before it blows looks pretty huge). Suffocation could conceivably occur relatively close to the explosion, by the explosive robbing nearby O2 (CH4 + 2O2 → heat + CO2 + 2H2O), but I imagine it would be much more likely that your chest cavity would expand/crush under the pressure at that kind of distance anyhow, and then you'd be buried in rubble. Your ears might ring a bit afterwards, too.

... at least, thats my understanding. ... so remember, never use vacuums!

Isn't the second law of thermodynamics "things always get more random / warmer"? Presumably the burning reaction makes the molecules more random, and it's definitely getting warmer.

After doing some Googling, it isn't necessarily the same molecules that are burning and releasing oxygen. If you mix something that's going to burn with Sodium Chlorate, NaClO3, then 2 NaClO3 + heat --> 2 NaCl + 3 O2.

Um hello, the o2 didn't explode the balloon with oxygen exploded....