"Sapphire water" fire supression system

Wrath of the Swarm said:
But whether an acid is strong or weak says little about how potent it is, just whether it disassociates quickly or slowly.
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I thought it was whether it totally dissociated or not, pH is the concentration of ions in the solution, and whether the acid or base was strong or weak had everything to do with potency.
 
Virgil said:
this is info my undergrad prof told me. he was burnt badly while in grad school. he said his oozed for 20 years, and never healed right. most scars get better over time these don't. the one time I saw his arms, they looked creepy even after 20 years.

most likey IMO it was the HF from the decomp of F2 gets in the wound and is not washed out at the hospital. so it is "sealed in" and continues to irritate the tissue, causing excess fluid to build up and leak out. throuh the badly healed scar tissue

/snip/

these injurys were from the 1960' so perhaps ER docs have improved their treatments to prevent or fix this condition.
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Whoa. Both awful and awesome.

Couldn't you excise the affected tissue and just have a major scar but not a weeping wound? And how much would that hurt 10 years after the fact?
 
Okay, it looks like the standard solution for Hf acid burns is a calcium gluconate immersion or treatment. Is this effective? Why can't this be done after the fact?
 
neutrino_cannon said:
I thought it was whether it totally dissociated or not, pH is the concentration of ions in the solution, and whether the acid or base was strong or weak had everything to do with potency.
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You are correct.
 
again I'm not an MD but I believe HF dissolves in the human fluids and diffuses into the surrounding tissue so to remove it all you would have to cut out a significant amount of the surrounding tissue.

it can and should be done but to get it all you might need to do injections around the wound site not just a flush


also, the pH (or better the pKa) of the acid is a thermodynamic property, the equlibrium constant, and has nothing to do with that rate of disassociation.

that is pH (pKa) is a direct measure of potency. for example alcohol has a pKa of 18 vs HF has a pKa of ca. -3. so you can spill alcohol on your hand and not feel a burn, while is you spill HF on you hand you burn a hole in your hand. this is because HF is 10e21 times stronger

in a simplistic view in a beaker of alcohol there is ca. one molecule of H+ while a beaker of HF is entirely H+

hope that helps



Virgil
 
Sorry to disrupt the original thread, but this is fascinating. Not-quite-Mrs. LFTKBS has the chem degree, but we never talk about super cool stuff like the delayed reaction between getting hit by Hf acid and then getting major tissue damage 8 hours later.

I think I have to start a new topic.
 
These perfluorinated compounds were used long ago as diving fluid. instead of breathing air for deep deep dives you inhale a liquid with dissolved oxygen in it. Don't know if it ever went into use with the Navy.
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How do they suppress the cough reflex resulting from liquid in the lungs?
 
I think that HF is a weak inorganic acid - its pKa is approx. +3, not -3. So there wouldn't be that much H+ in the beaker (the exact % dissociation depending on the concentration of acid, of course).
 
Ladewig said:


How do they suppress the cough reflex resulting from liquid in the lungs?
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sorry don't know I work in the theory side that more of an engineering problem. I know it was on the drawing board I'm not sure if it was ever used on humans.

LFTKBS
http://www.mnpoison.org/index.asp?pageID=151


JamesM

I hope I didn't make that big of a mistake...I'll double check my pKa table later, but your probably right

edit I think my example is still good ROH vs. HF 10e15 ?
Virgil
 
LFTKBS said:
Okay, it looks like the standard solution for Hf acid burns is a calcium gluconate immersion or treatment. Is this effective? Why can't this be done after the fact?
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Thanks LKTKBS....calcium gluconate is what we have in our kits.

I would kinda like to get this thread back on track though. ;)
 
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