OK, so I live in the Boston area, and you may have heard about the winter we are having. I hate snow in the best of times. And you can probably guess where this is going.
I was joking the other day that I wished I had a flamethrower to use on the 3 feet of standing snow and I really do have a 12 foot high snowbank next to my garage.
Anyway, when I have seen flamethrowers in old WWII footage, they shoot a sticky material that burns for some time when it hits the target (and that matches the wikipedia article on newer forms of napalm). Anyway, if I were to go to town on the snow with a real military flamethrower, how would it go? Would the napalm be quickly diluted by the melting snow and put out?
I know it is a dumb question, but I am havin g trouble imagining how it would behave…
I am a Southerner living in the Boston area and I hate snow too but your plan simply will not work. Like Mr. Duality said, it takes a whole lot of fire to melt snow. You can build a huge bonfire, I mean really big with 20 gallons of diesel fuel used to start it and giant logs burning for 8 hours and there will still be snow just off the perimeter when the fire department responds at 1:00 am. You can stand there is your bathrobe telling them to get off your property and that everything is fine and they will still spray it with water. It will freeze over later and you still have almost as much snow as you did before but now you have ice and the threat of a fine plus neighbors woken up all over the block because of all the flashing lights. Chalk that one up as a hard lesson learned.
Flamethrowers won’t work worth a damn. It isn’t that hard to ignite chemicals that will burn in water but it won’t get rid of your problem. The only hope is global warming which isn’t coming as quickly as they promised or a time-share somewhere.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t asking if it would be effective from an energy perspective. Or if it is intelligent use of resources. I am well aware of the energy required to melt the snow.
I was mostly curious how the flamethrower (napalm) would behave on the snow. Would it burn on the surface and generally do little (like a campfire which, living in NH I can have and the FD won’t bother me if I have either a permit or snowcover), would the burning napalm melt the snow, diluting itself until quickly and going out, would it sink into the snow and keep burning, giving the effect of burning snow… Some other phenomenon I haven’t thought of?
Not that I actually advocate this, but you could mix some gasoline with some styrofoam, and you’d have a fairly close approximation of modern napalm that you could toss on some snow and light.
I did have an incident at around 12 when I tried to make napalm from gasoline and LA Looks hair gel. That didn’t work like I had hoped. None of my experiments did.
I made lots of explosives and incendiary device back in the day but that was in Louisiana. We didn’t have any snow to speak of. This is one of those Mythbusters types of experiments. It is trivial to make things that will burn in snow or even under water but burning through snow and melting it is a different matter. Heat rises and melting water creates a natural heat shield around it. You can light a fire in an igloo and keep it toasty warm with no problem. I would guess the effect is that you just get some fuel that burns through the surface in assorted spots and then just burns itself out.
According to my information, modern napalm-b (which I admit I don’t know was ever used in flamethrowers) burns at something like 2,000°F, for ten minutes, and is apparently difficult to douse with water (though it doesn’t contain an oxidizer). I don’t know how well that would effect snow, though—I don’t think I’ve even seen snow with my own eyes for something like four years. And of course, I wasn’t testing out napalm on it.
Perhaps elemental sodium, or burning magnesium might do the trick?
The problem with burning magnesium is that while it’ll burn through the snow OK, it’ll then proceed to burn through the driveway as well.
What about building some kind of remote control rocket that can use it’s exhaust to hover over the snow, forcing the fire down into it and melting it that way?