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Old 07-09-2019, 04:11 PM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
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Quote:
Originally Posted by teflonrocketry1
Green means you don't need heavy personal protection (like from a SCAPE suit) to work around the materials and there is much less potential for them to spread into the environment.

I handled hydrazine in a chemical fume hood. If that stuff spilled while a tank was being filled on a rocket it could potentially react with something nearby and probably cause an explosion or fire. Hydrazine is volatile like ammonia and would spread rapidly and get everywhere in the nearby area. You would need special gloves air tight clothing and a separate source of breathing air to clean up the mess.

The ionic liquid mixtures on the other hand are for the most part non-volatile and could be handled and cleaned up without a separate air source, although I would still wear protective clothing and gloves.
My father was a Fire Chief in the Miami Fire Department, and he was terrified of hypergolic reactants (having fought a few warehouse fires in which such substances were involved) because they can't be extinguished until they're all reacted; the only option is to cover them with lots of dirt, cordon off the area, and wait. Also:

As I read and saw in a 1950s-vintage issue of "Popular Science" (in which it was touted as a shining example of modern scientific progress), hydrazine used to be sprayed onto onions (and possibly also garlic bulbs) to prevent them from sprouting in grocery stores. It was also used as a defoliant (applied using garden pump sprayers) along railroad tracks, to kill weeds--a lot of college students made a little money doing that work. The article didn't say what variety of hydrazine it was (monomethyl hydrazine [the monopropellant thruster type] or the "regular" N2H4 type), or if it was diluted in some other substance, but I wouldn't care to inhale or ingest any type of hydrazine, in any concentration (although I imagine that after being sprayed on onions, it reacted to make other substances--but they might not be exactly beneficial, either).
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