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Cool to the Touch

The quenching disc and tube at the scale of the hole: why a passage under fifteen thousandths stops a flame, why the disc stays cool, what pressure does to the margin, the part Ethan had made in alumina, and the patents on either side of Stan's.

The archive's own copy, 20 September 2026 33 MB

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What was shown

Episode 9 walked the whole burner stack and the evening the quenching circuit came from. This film takes one part of it, the quenching disc and the quenching tube, at the scale of the hole, and reads Stan's six-line specification against standard flame-arrestor physics: a port of at most 0.015 in, at least 1/8 in long, in alumina, many to a disc, 'preventing the moving gas atoms from re-grouping', and 'independent of both gas-velocity and gas-pressure'. It ends at the bench: the alumina disc Ethan had made to the drawing, which came back at 0.009 in and 3/8 in long, the two tests it has had, and five measurements for the round table on 27 September 2026, where Ethan leads.

About the voice. Where you hear Stan Meyer in this film, you are hearing a synthetic voice built by a machine from thirty seconds of his voice on the Deer Creek conference tape of 1985. It reads twelve lines, each his own words and each cited below; the spoken ones are taken from the site's transcripts as written, and nothing is added. The narrator is a stock voice and nobody in particular. Treat both as a reading, not a recording.

What is assumed. The tube quenching diameter is taken as 0.30 mm for stoichiometric hydrogen-oxygen at one atmosphere (the published plate figure is about 0.2 mm, and a round port runs 1.3 to 1.5 times the plate figure), and scaled as one over the burning velocity (the Peclet criterion at fixed diffusivity) and as one over absolute pressure. Burning velocities: raw 2:1 gas about 1,000 cm/s; hydrogen in air 265 to 325 cm/s (the table in US 4,421,474); Stan's diluted mixture 42 to 47 cm/s (his memos). Jet velocity assumes 1 L/min through nineteen 0.009 in ports. The script that drew the two charts is in the repository beside this film.

Why a hole stops a flame

A flame is a thin reaction sheet that heats the gas ahead of it and lives on that heat; walls closer than its quenching distance draw the heat out faster than the burning replaces it, and the sheet dies. The distance shrinks as the burning velocity rises. Stan's picture (Figure 2-5) puts the diluent atoms between hydrogen and oxygen inside the passage instead of a wall; the two pictures agree that the mixture sets the hole, and he said so himself in New Zealand in 1989: more non-combustible gas, and 'the holes can elongate even a little greater'.

On one line: raw 2:1 gas needs a port of 0.3 mm or less; hydrogen in air, 0.9 mm; his 42 to 47 cm/s mixture, about 6 mm. Stan's 381 µm port sits on the raw-gas point; Ethan's 229 µm port sits under it with a quarter to spare; for the mixture he specified both have twenty times to spare. The diluent is most of the margin.

Length, flow, flame-out

The 1/8 in minimum makes the port a channel (L/d 8; Ethan's is 42): a flame must survive the whole length against the wall, which is how industrial arrestors are built (crimped ribbon, sinter, capillary). At 1 L/min through nineteen 0.009 in ports the gas moves at 21 m/s in the port, laminar, about twice the raw flame speed, with 0.4 ms of residence. On velocity the memo's 'independent' holds: faster flow only helps. Turned down, the flame cannot come home through a sub-quench port; it goes out at the mouth. Blown out, a port is relit by its neighbours: the 'overlapping flame-pattern' of Figure 2-6, and Einsiedeln 1989's 'the adjoining flame will reignite the gases'.

Cool to the touch

The flame stands off the face by about its quenching distance in a dead space of unburnt gas; cold gas flows outward through the very ports heat would enter by (transpiration cooling); and the specified mixture burns cooler than raw gas, which is the reason Stan gave. All three are carried by flow. Turn the flow down and a ceramic burner face glows, which is what a radiant heater is. The round table's thermocouple should draw temperature against flow.

Pressure

Quenching distance falls roughly as one over absolute pressure. For his 47 cm/s mixture the largest safe port is still about 1 mm at 6 atm, three times his port and five times Ethan's: the claim holds for the gas he specified. For raw gas at 12 psi on the gauge (1.8 atm absolute) the line has dropped under both ports. The claim is correct about his machine and incorrect about a bare cell under pressure; the difference is the diluent. Chris's July 2024 test put a single port under the cell's pressure with a gauge reading to about 12 psi; the measurement for the round table is a flame at the mouth with a pressure step behind it, on the cell's own gas.

The tube, the regulator, the safety

The quenching tube (memo WFC 435, Figure 3, 'Spark Arresting Gas Line', 1981; Deer Creek 1985's basement-to-22nd-floor; claim 6 of WO 92/08046, the conduit from the cavity to the injector rail, 0.015 to 0.025 in bore) is the disc made long: a sub-quench capillary is an arrestor along its whole length, and at these bores also narrower than the fastest flame front in this gas can propagate in. Episode 24 read the claim against the certified gap.

A disc on an enclosed cell makes the cell the quenching circuit: every exit is under the quenching size, so nothing lit outside comes in, at any flow. The mixture the disc is sized for is the mixture the cell makes; the archive's figure for dissolved air is 1.85 % of the water and a thousandth of a per cent of the gas, so the working burner's brake is the recycling tube of Figure 2-3, through a valve, on demand, the flame labelled 47 to 1 cm/s. What the disc does not guarantee is the headspace, which is inside the arrestor: a litre of 2:1 gas at 1 atm holds about 9 kJ, and the margin falls with pressure. CA 1,227,094 (filed 4 February 1983) puts a rupturable safety valve and a pressure switch on the cell and, on the exhaust return, a cooling chamber that 'also functions as a spark arrestor' (claim 15); the memo vents the gases above the water bath.

The shelf

Before him: Lampert for Rheem, US 2,646,789 (1953), flashback prevention when a burner is turned off; Wittek, EP 0 044 353 (1982). His: US 4,421,474 (1983), the burner with barrier, non-combustible gas trap and return valve; US 4,465,455 (1984); CA 1,227,094 (1987); US 4,826,581 (1989), where the quenching circuit is 'a restricted orifice through which the particle stream passes such that flashback does not occur'. Citing him: Swiatosz for the US Navy, US 4,934,927 (1990); Eberspächer, US 4,650,415; Stordy, GB 2 215 031; Eng, US 4,957,431; US 2011/0185990 ('an effective way to combust the mixture'); AMF Den Boer, US 11,428,405 (2022), citing 4,465,455.

For the round table

A thermocouple on the back of the disc against flow; turn the gas down and film where the flame dies; a flame at the mouth with a pressure step behind it on the cell's gas; shut the valve fast and listen for the pop; the arrestor and the bubbler in the line throughout.

quenching disc quenching tube quenching circuit flame arrestor gas mixing regulator non-combustible gases US 4,421,474 CA 1,227,094 round table synthetic voice