Military Tech Manuals

[Phil]

Yes, that does sound more like nitrogen triiodide, although certain transition metal picrate salts are also explosive as well as highly coloured. Picric acid itself is a weak acid and not particularly corrosive, but it is one heck of a detonator.

Incidentally, we do Open Day demonstrations of nitrogen triiodide at my University. We used to tickle it with a feather on a stick to detonate it, but now we have a totally reliable contactless method - it detonates when exposed to the beam from one of those violet laser pointers you can now buy for less than twenty bucks at Hamvention. Both red and green laser pointers have insufficient photon energy to initiate detonation - a nice demonstration of activation energy.

Phil M1GWZ



On 15 Nov 2014, at 06:50, Richard Barth wrote:

> Pretty purple stain?  Sounds like the nitrogen triiodide we use to fool around with in chem lab when I was in school.
> Make a little, while it's still damp spread it around the floor, and wait for the graduate assistant to walk into the room.
> Messy, noisy and a welcome break from the routine.
> 
> BTW, would somebody please send me Phil's emails on this subject? For some reason I didn't get them.
> 
> Dick
> 
> At 11:47 PM 11/14/2014, Mike ODELL wrote:
>> picric acid was the initiator of the blast that sunk the battleship Maine.
>> 
>> it makes a really pretty violet stain when it detonates in small amounts.
>> 
>>       - mo

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