In the Wake of 9/11, Scientists Create Additive That Prevents Jet Fuel From Exploding

After the 9/11 attacks in which planes flew into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, scientists set out to revive research started in the 1970s on a jet fuel additive that would make it less explosive. As of this week, researchers announced the creation of such a polymer.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory created a polymer that could safely be added to jet fuel. These polymers link under certain conditions to form what's called "megasupramolecules." These megasupramolecules, the researcher found, could "control fuel misting, improve the flow of fuel through pipelines and reduce soot formation," Caltech's website stated.

High-speed video the difference in the flammability of jet fuel treated with a new Caltech polymer (below) and jet fuel that did not have the additive (above). (Image source: YouTube)

"We hope these new polymers will save lives and minimize burns that result from postimpact fuel fires,"  Julia Kornfield, a Caltech chemical engineering professor, said according to the university's news article on the development.

Here's more on the reaction that occurs with jet engines and fuel that can cause extremely hazardous conditions:

Jet engines compress air and combine it with a fine spray of jet fuel. Ignition of the mixture of air and jet fuel by an electric spark triggers a controlled explosion that thrusts the plane forward. Jet airplanes are powered by thousands of these tiny explosions. However, the process that distributes the spray of fuel for ignition—known as misting—also causes fuel to rapidly disperse and easily catch fire in the event of an impact.

The polymer created by these researchers that can form megasupramolecules inhibits this dangerous misting during a crash, but still allows misting during normal fuel injections. The special thing about this polymer is that it can form megasupramolecules and also reverse into smaller parts, making it more useful.

Kornfield explains more about the megasupramolecules in this video:

Here's how they work in a crash situation:

When an impact occurs, the supramolecules spring into action. The supramolecules spend most of their time coiled up in a compact conformation. When there is a sudden elongation of the fluid, however, the polymer molecules stretch out and resist further elongation. This stretching allows them to inhibit the breakup of droplets under impact conditions—thus reducing the size of explosions—as well as to reduce turbulence in pipelines.

This video shows the difference between treated and untreated jet fuel:

The polymer is now on its way toward approval as a fuel additive and Dr. Ming-Hsin "Jeremy" Wei with Caltech said he is in the process of developing a method for mass production.

"Looking to the future, if you want to use this additive in thousands of gallons of jet fuel, diesel or oil, you need a process to mass-produce it," Wei told the institute's news site. "That is why my goal is to develop a reactor that will continuously produce the polymer—and I plan to achieve it less than a year from now."

This research was published in the journal Science.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology's World Trade Center Investigation, "a different combination of impact damage and heat-weakened structural components" resulted in the collapse of the Twin Towers.

"The WTC towers likely would not have collapsed under the combined effects of aircraft impact damage and the extensive, multi-floor fires that were encountered on September11, 2001, if the thermal insulation had not been widely dislodged or had been only minimally dislodged by aircraft impact," NIST concluded.

Discrediting conspiracy theories, NIST reported that it "found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001. NIST also did not find any evidence that missiles were fired at or hit the towers. Instead, photographs and videos from several angles clearly showed that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors and that the collapse progressed from the initiating floors downward, until the dust clouds obscured the view."

Popular Science reported ahead of a separate spring 2005 NIST report that jet fuel from the planes played a role in spreading these fires.

"It's very hard to document where the fuel went, but if it's atomized and combustible and gets to an ignition source, it'll go off," Forman Williams, a NIST adviser and a combustion expert, told Popular Science at the time.

(H/T: Popular Science)