Polumna Experiments

Black
Powder

A Polumna was formed from a strip of a poster (1 meter
long, 87 mm wide), wich produced a triangle with a base of 125 mm long, and a
height of 62 mm.
Again using a drinking straw filled with black powder as a
fuse, but this time a thin drinking straw, to improve confinement.

This
Polumna was filled with 3 grams of black powder, leaving lots of room for
expansion. Rupture of the casing happened with a very satifying deep explosion.

This charge was placed between 2 bricks we had lying
around ...

No damage was done to the bricks, the one on top was just
lobbed of when the charge exploded.
On the picture below you can see the
blasted open polumna (the white dot on the left pic) wich landed a few meters
away near the gate.

This was definately more the I expected from my homemade black
powder ...

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Flash Powder (KMnO4:Al:S in 3:2:1 ratio)

Now trying a much smaller polumna, formed from a
paper strip of 50 mm wide and 290 mm long (1/4 of a printer A4 paper,
lengthwise).
This gives a triangle with a base of 75 mm and a height of 35
mm and was filled with 2 grams of KMnO4-flash.

As you can see on the picture above right, I (with my eagle eye and
super reflexes) was lucky enough to catch the explosion on my tiny little cam.

And it explodes exactly how I expected from flash. Violently, and with a
deep boom. Much louder then the big one with the black powder !!

Again,
no damage was done to the bricks, but the upper brick flew alot higher, and made
a few salto's, instead of just being pushed up for a moment.

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