I'm purely theorizing but it seems to me if you slipped a very small thermite device into the gas tank that the extreme heat would evaporate the gas very quickly which would then mix with air and burn far faster than normal turning the gas tank into a 1000 lbs high energy bomb. There is a lot of energy in a full tank of gas. You just need a way to release it all at once.
Interesting theorizing, but no. The problem isn’t vaporizing the fuel, it’s mixing it with enough air - and there’s just not enough air in a gas tank. Figure about 50 pounds of fuel in the average half-full tank, we need 14.7 pounds of air for every pound of fuel, a pound of air is a bit less than 20 cubic feet.... you’d need about 15000 cubic feet of air, that’s more air than would fill in a 1500 square foot house.
That's my whole point. If you can vaporize the gas by quickly boiling it you can rupture the gas tank and use the air around the car. It becomes a fuel air bomb. You could also add some small amount of oxidizer to the small device you placed in the fuel tank. Imagine pushing something roughly like a foot or two of garden hose down into the tank. The only thing to stop you if the anti theft measures and they could figure out a way around that. Or perhaps beads of stuff pored into it.
If you got even the equivalence of a single stick of TNT to go off and that ruptured the gas tank and vaporized the gas all in one boom... the follow on explosion of the gas as it met with the air would be massive. I've used dynamite before to blow up beaver dams. A single stick of detagel is just a sausage maybe 1.5 inches in diameter and 3-4 inches long. I'm pretty sure the same amount of thermite would generate way more energy it just takes it longer. Still more than enough to rupture a gas tank. Might not even be actual thermite. You find the right stuff and it could be deceptively small and hard to detect, but when that gas mixes with the air... boom.
Way back in the early 1900s gas stations used to blow up all the time. Gas is unstable as all holy hell. There is a reason why the military uses JP8 which is basically a type of diesel.
I'm purely theorizing but it seems to me if you slipped a very small thermite device into the gas tank that the extreme heat would evaporate the gas very quickly which would then mix with air and burn far faster than normal turning the gas tank into a 1000 lbs high energy bomb. There is a lot of energy in a full tank of gas. You just need a way to release it all at once.
Interesting theorizing, but no. The problem isn’t vaporizing the fuel, it’s mixing it with enough air - and there’s just not enough air in a gas tank. Figure about 50 pounds of fuel in the average half-full tank, we need 14.7 pounds of air for every pound of fuel, a pound of air is a bit less than 20 cubic feet.... you’d need about 15000 cubic feet of air, that’s more air than would fill in a 1500 square foot house.
That's my whole point. If you can vaporize the gas by quickly boiling it you can rupture the gas tank and use the air around the car. It becomes a fuel air bomb. You could also add some small amount of oxidizer to the small device you placed in the fuel tank. Imagine pushing something roughly like a foot or two of garden hose down into the tank. The only thing to stop you if the anti theft measures and they could figure out a way around that. Or perhaps beads of stuff pored into it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon
If you got even the equivalence of a single stick of TNT to go off and that ruptured the gas tank and vaporized the gas all in one boom... the follow on explosion of the gas as it met with the air would be massive. I've used dynamite before to blow up beaver dams. A single stick of detagel is just a sausage maybe 1.5 inches in diameter and 3-4 inches long. I'm pretty sure the same amount of thermite would generate way more energy it just takes it longer. Still more than enough to rupture a gas tank. Might not even be actual thermite. You find the right stuff and it could be deceptively small and hard to detect, but when that gas mixes with the air... boom.
Way back in the early 1900s gas stations used to blow up all the time. Gas is unstable as all holy hell. There is a reason why the military uses JP8 which is basically a type of diesel.