What Would Happen if You Mixed C4 with Gasoline?

CRazy...LovE CrAzy...don't forget to get your mate to film the experience and post it on YouTube, as you won't be around to see it

Do you sense a Darwin award?

OH MY YES !!!

Actually, this would be a good one for Mythbusters - those guys love to blow things up. Maybe they could also try Semtex, Octogen, or Octanitrocubane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octanitrocubane to see which one increases horsepower the most. After all, what is nitromethane? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitromethane

"Everybody's nuts" - Sigmund Freud

I do not propose to be an explosives expert but, I suspect exactly nothing. Back in the day we used c4 to heat C-Rations. You could take a small piece of it and tease it out into a fine rope then light it. It would burn nice and tamely but if you wadded it into a ball and lit it in the center of the ball using cap of just by plunging a match into the center, it would blow. Short version, small thin pieces no problem, big chunk watch out.

Dude, I suggest trying it in a calm place like your garage. Make sure you light a cigarette before opening the cans. You surely have too much time in your hands.

I'd think the issue would be with the combustion rate. Gasoline burns much slower than C4. A method to slow down the combustion of the C4 would be needed, otherwise you'll blow a holes through your pistons due to the intense impulse energy.

It takes time for the piston to travel through the cylender. You need to choose a fuel that can burn throughout the duration of the stroke.

I spent almost 8 yrs in the army as a combat engineer and fully understand the capabilities of C-4.

First, C-4 requires heat and pressure to explode. Second, the force provided by the explosion created by C-4 is a cutting force. Third, 1 lbs C-4 is equivalent to 1.25 lbs of TNT. I don't remember where gasoline is on the comparison chart, but it is nowhere near C-4. Putting C-4 into an ICE would render holes in the combustion chamber wherever that piece of C-4 was touching the side or blow out the valves.

WWkayaker,

I believe you put the hammer on the nail here, to coin a phrase, on what are the critical concerns. Does an ICE produce sufficient temperatures and pressures to detonate and not just burn C4? If detonation will happen, how much mixed in C4 will be needed to shred the engine compartment with the secondary shock wave?

Testing this though does sound like a search for a Darwin award.

To make the point of how much pressure and heat is necessary, you could light a small piece C-4 on fire with a cigarette lighter and then stomp on it to put it out. The pressure from stomping on it would cause it to explode and you would be headed for the ER. I would say, Yes, an ICE has enough heat and pressure to explode the C-4 causing major damage.

The pressure from stomping on it would cause it to explode and you would be headed for the ER

More than what you needed to say,..........you talk about pressure, is that pressure, or the shockwave that detonates C4?

I think it would take a little more then stomping on it with your foot, maybe more like hitting it with a hammer.

don't know, I have zero experience.

but is is it pressure or shock that sets it off?

I think it's shock. I've heard you can do what ever you want with C4 and nothing will happen but if you apply a blasing cap, then you have excitement.

Is C4 soluble?

If it is, will it dissolve in gasoline and if it does will it loose it's properties because when it does dissolve wouldn't that breakdown its ability to function the way it did in solid form?

I would also wonder if it did dissolve, would that make the gasoline thicker in consistency and a little harder to flow through the fuel system resulting you your car starving for fuel.

C4 needs an impact of some kind to make it explode. If you were to just set it on fire it would just burn so it needs a blasting cap.

Adding it to your fuel will probably just clog your filter and never reach the combustion chamber.

I certainly wouldn't put a pound of C4 in my engine to see what happens - it would blow up. The idea is to introduce tiny, tiny amounts of some chemical into the gasoline to see if it produces a more powerful explosion in the combustion chamber without damaging the engine. Right now nitrous oxide and nitro methane are the only two options to boost horsepower - are they related to nitroglycerin? Actually, C4 is probably the wrong choice to experiment with, but there are many others:

Explosives can be classified into two broad categories, called "high order explosives" or "low order explosives". High explosives produce a defining supersonic over-pressurization shock wave. Detonation rates are usually between 1000 to 10000 yards/second. Examples are TNT [trinitrotoluene], PETN [pentaerythritol tetranitrate], RDX [cyclonite], plastic-bonded explosives such as C-4 or Semtex, dynamite, nitroglycerin, and ammonium nitrate/fuel oil (ANFO) mixtures. It is custom to rank the explosive destructive capability in terns of TNT equivalents, for example, plastic bonded explosives such as Semtex may contain 1.5 times the explosive destructive power as TNT on an unit weight basis.

Low order explosives create a subsonic explosion. Burn rates may be on the order of inches to yards per second. The characteristic overpressurization shock wave is not produced. Examples are gunpowder, pipe bombs, ignition of gasoline vapors, Molotov cocktails, and aircraft used as guided missiles. A vapor cloud explosion that occurs if the chemical concentration in the air is between the lower and upper explosion limits and is ignited fall into this classification.

If any of these substances could be dissolved in gasoline and produce more horsepower without exploding the engine and the occupants, you could probably sell it and make a lot of money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRYwrHQyJAM

"Everybody's nuts." - Sigmund Freud

Whatever you come up with will need to completely dissolve in the gasoline and not clog the filters. It will also need to be stable in the mixture as well as in the high temps of the deserts.

route89,

Well, there you go, you now have all of the pertinent pieces to do something possibly very dangerous. First if C4 will dissolve in gasoline then you don't have to worry about particulate size. If not you'll have to find away to safely pulverize C4 into little pieces small enough to pass through the gasoline filter.

Tune in next week to the CR4 edition of Jackass. Find out if our guest victim dies trying to use his Oster blender to puree C4 in a gasoline bath. Find out what happens as the fuel pump of our intrepid contestant's Volkswagen Rabbit pressurizes the high energy slurry. Will the first ignition cycle drive the piston through the oil pan of this vintage machine. Or will the the engine endure the added punishment brought on by the C4 mixture at idle, only to explode in a shower of distressed metal during full throttle testing.

Somebody else suggested that this sounds like a Mythbusters episode. Well to quote Jamie and Adam, "Don't try this at home.Ever!"

Sorry, mate, it's been done already (no, not C4 - something a lot more dangerous).

Certainly it would be dangerous to add explosives to gasoline to test in an engine, which is why I would stand way back in case the engine explodes. Adding nitrous oxide to gasoline is also dangerous, and it routinely detonates many engines on a daily basis. And yet, there it is at almost every race track. Nitromethane is becoming very scarce and expensive, and I just think that there must be some other fuel that would provide a horsepower boost and not kill people. Maybe micro powdered aluminum, like the Space Shuttle uses. At any rate, I would bet that the person that suggested using diesel engines in a race car was also ridiculed, but it turned out to be quite successul:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_R10

I don't think people here are getting past the devastating potential of C4. Though I don't think it's a practical fuel for IC. The wiki might help explain. Key being the pressure wave, it just combusts too fast. You don't' want the all the energy to expel instantaneously, you want it to expel it's energy slowly over the duration of the stroke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-4_(explosive)

...and your right about diesels. Go get yourself a diesel Ram or F350, install a $500 tuner chip (to increase boost, fuel volume, and fueling duration) and enjoy 12 second 1/4 mile times in your 6500lb truck. Though prepare to spend a fortune replacing injectors, fuel pumps, head gaskets... I'd think building a diesel race car would pose a weight and balance challenge. Diesels require fairly large heavy blocks with huge bearing surfaces to survive the torque, but clearly Audi did a great job with theirs.

Nitrous will destroy engines that are running lean. Too much oxidizer with too little fuel will burn the fuel faster and hotter. Think of how an oxy/acy torch cuts faster with more oxygen. However with proper a/f ratios it's perfectly safe unless your running too big of a shot on cast internals.

Refresh my memory - it's older than Uncle Bill's spats. Doesn't nitro work so well because you don't need so much oxygen? Would C4 do that also?

So in the end, nitrous can easily destroy an engine, but if it's used in the correct a/f ratio, it's safe and boosts power. That was my original thought from the very beginning about adding C4, or some other explosive. Certainly it will destroy an engine if you use too much, but maybe if you put the exact right amount it would boost hp safely. At any rate, I doubt if it's ever been done and it would be interesting, one way or the other, to see what would happen. Thanks for all the interesting comments...

route89,

I don't think you quite grasp pretendgineer's comment about the shockwave speed. Gasoline with its slow shockwave has time to push the piston down. While the shockwave from C4 is so short that it tends to cut or punch, not push. Nitrous oxide increases the amount of oxidizer per volume so more gasoline can be successfully burned in the same volume. Putting aside the dangerous process of suspending or dissolving C4 in gasoline so that no orifice gets clogged with explosive particles. Because of this rapid "burn" of C4, I suspect that if you start with a low C4 to gasoline ratio (a safe approach) you will initially see little to no effect in horse power improvement. For the little tiny micro-explosions will only cause ricocheting shockwave to bounce around in the combustion chamber. That is until you increase the concentration high enough that the magnitude of these shockwaves exceeds the brittle breaking point of some component of the combustion chamber. My guess will be the ceramic of the spark plug.

While Mythbusters did not attempt to use C4 in an ICE of a vehicle, they did test the use of gunpowder as a fuel for a variety of engine designs. Gunpowder has a slower burn than C4 but higher than gasoline. These problems of expansion speeds were exactly the problems they ran into. If my memory serves me correctly, they did have partial success with black powder (slower burn) but this still damaged equipment.

I believe this is a bad idea that can only exasperate, damage equipment and maybe damage you. DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS. Maybe you can find at the Mythbusters web site the gunpowder engine episode and see for yourself.

Very well explained. I appreciate the effort and I will not try it in my BMW. Sounds like it would just be introducing a massive pre-detonation effect as the faster-moving shock wave hit the piston on the way up. However, it might shake loose that stuck ring I have in #5 cylinder :-) So how do alcohol diesels work? And what about the R/C model airplane engines I have that are 2 cycle diesels and burn a nitromethane mixture?

"You will also find that your engines will generally run well somewhere between 5 and 15% nitromethane. I use 15% nitromethane on my performance planes, like the Extra, Cap 232, etc., with either the K & B .48 or the OS.61 FX, but all my other planes for sport run fine on 10% nitromethane."

Don't alcohol and nitromethane have a different burn rate than diesel fuel? What about adding compressed natural gas (CNG) to diesel fuel? Does this work:

Mixing CNG with diesel fuel

CO2 powered V8

Lego V8

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