Wonderous Lifesaving Inventions of the Near Past. Where are they now?

Factual Questions
1

I was watching a program on The Learning Channel one evening and they showed a fireproof paint developed shortly after or during WW2. I was impressed. They built two identical rooms. Furnished them identically. One room was coated with the fire proof paint. One not. They lit small fires in both. Within minutes, both rooms were infernos. The untreated room collapsed. The treated room looked a wreck, but was standing.

When they entered it, removed the charred wreckage, a man went in with a paint scraper, easily removed the blackened, now foamed up paint to expose unburned wood behind it. Most of the wood was not even scorched!

They cleaned the room and repainted it. The fire did not hurt the integrity of the structure!

Had it been a home, damage would have been minimal, aside from the normal smoke. Repairs would have been minimal. The fire might even have been contained in one room.

What was this stuff and why don’t we have it now? We have fire resistant paint that slows down burning, but not fire proof! Just think of how many lives this stuff could have saved?

I saw a movie once of a gas tank explosion preventer. They filled two 5 gallon cans with gas. One was also filled with a very fine steel mesh. (The volume took away about 1/6 of a gallon or less.) Firemen shot both cans with a high velocity rifle.

The untreated can went up like a bomb. The treated can, … leaked.

They did this with several different containers. It was to be used in fuel tanks to help stop explosions in crashes.

What happened to it? Think of it used in aircraft! Those massive explosions might not happen. Think of it used in cars, regular gas cans, volatile liquid cans! Why don’t we have it?

They said the mesh took up little actual volume and damped explosions.

It worked. Where did it go?

2

Airplanes do have mesh or other baffles in the fuel tanks.
How this helps I cannot guess.

The other one, since it foams, might give off toxic gasses.
More likely, though, it just costs more. Wouldn’t have to be much more to make it a novelty you never hear of, only known to people who paint boiler rooms at car plants.

3

is available at the better quality specialty paint stores.

It is very expensive.

You may be able to get an insurance break if you use this stuff.

Some states (like Tennessee) require that foster homes use this material.

4

They’ve been messing with foam and gel additives to commercial airline fuel for nearly thirty years. I don’t know whether they have implemented it or not. Some problems that foams or gels have include the additional weight (reducing aircraft performance) and the issue of keeping the injectors free-flowing. (It isn’t really comforting to have a fuel that won’t burn on the ground if it freezes up and starves your engines at 35,000 feet.)

They may have solved the problems and begun using the additives, but I hadn’t heard that, yet.

5

Stock cars use foam/mesh stuff in the gas tanks, though whether it’s to help prevent fires, to keep the fuel from sloshing, or both I don’t know.

6

As racinchikki said. You can get fuel cells from most automotice performance places. They may help safety, but I don’t know how foolproof they are. The few track rules I’ve seen require them, but also require that the cell be mounted inside the roll cage.

You want fire resistance? Here’s a site I found for ballistic fuel tanks. They sound like a standard fuel cell with a self-sealing case.

7

In F1 car racing I believe that the fual tanks are effectively large, encased sponges so that even when ruptured very little fuel leaks out.

8

The mesh they inserted in the fuel tanks is different from the baffles in airliners. The baffles are designed to suppress sloshing, which would noticeably unbalance the aircraft. I figured the stuff would be used in military aircraft to prevent explosions when hit by bullets.

I’ve not found any fire proof paint that is as effective as the stuff shown in the film clip.

9

The military does use fireresistant fuel for all combat missions. I am not sure if they do it for transport, etc. Airlines do not use it because it is simply too expensive.