The Broom Method | Hacker News Reader

The Broom Method

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50 pointszdw8 comments

Interesting in a ”the russians used a pencil” way, but the text confused me by talking about hydrogen _leaks_ being detected this way. Surely brooms can only indicate hydrogen _flames_.

Leaks can ignite. The Broom Method may not detect all leaks, but will ID the ones that are currently aflame and are, thus, a serious personal safety hazard.

I assume it happened once and became NASA lore.

In "Electronic Devices for Hydrogen Leak and Fire Detection", https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/4501882 :

> Broom. The use of a cane broom for detecting a hydrogen fire may sound ridiculous but when other devices are not available, a broom will provide a device for personnel safety warning. A hydrogen flame is invisible to the human eye. During hydrogen flame tests conducted by the author using a welding torch laying on the ground, personnel would have walked into the flame unless restrained. When warned, they disbelieved the warning until the heat striations appearing on the ground caused by sun rays shining through the flame were brought to their attention.

> A man required to work on the test stand when the stage is fueled can wave a cane broom in front of his path. If the broom bursts into flame, an invisible hydrogen flame is present.

Battleship New Jersey recently did a video about the (possibly apocryphal) method of detecting steam leaks with a broom. I wonder if NASA got the idea from old sailor lore.

It’s not apocryphal. My father worked for the US Navy making training and orientation films; one of these was about firefighting and hazardous materials handling on board ship. It included some entertaining segments — for some reason they use (or used, this was the 80s) pure sodium on some ships and they described the difficulty and danger of storing such a substance. The use of a broom to detect invisible but very dangerous leaks from high-pressure steam lines was also demonstrated.

At the end of this blog post we are given the chance to buy little bits of used space shuttle.

Volcanologists debate whether there are hydrogen flames burning at the surface of lava lakes. It's a surprisingly hard thing to test.

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