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Railroad tank car vacuum implosion

Tom Brattain · 6.7M views · 2008-09-29 · 0:19

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Overview

A brief demonstration of a railroad tank car imploding after a vacuum is pulled with its safety valves disabled.

On Hacker News

HN people link it as a striking illustration of atmospheric pressure crushing vessels, in threads on vacuum airships, hyperloop and the Titan sub.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2014–2023

Topics

Everyday physics & science demosMechanical & precision engineering
Search by tags
implosionatmospheric pressuretank carpressure vesselsvacuum

What people said

pfdietz · 2023-06 · Reference

> a buckling mode, which is inherently unstable. As soon as it goes, it goes all at once. Example of implosion of a railroad tank car: [VIDEO]

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Ruthalas · 2023-06 · Reference

This is likely less the case when the pressure differential is ~480 bar. Failure is going to occur on the order of fractions of a second at those huge pressures. (Fortunately?) Here's a pressure vessel failing at only 1 bar: [VIDEO]

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andrewmunsell · 2023-06 · Reference

There's obvious differences between the Oceangate sub and this (1 atm difference, this is a thinner steel(?) railroad tanker not a sub), but I think it effectively demonstrates how violent and quick an implosion would be: [VIDEO] Video contents: An experiment where the vacuum safety valves were removed from an oil tanker railroad car, and a vacuum was placed inside the car, resulting in it crumpling in an implosion. There is no gore or other specific disturbing content

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Sources

Video by Tom Brattain, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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