Word: carbonic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dark spot on an otherwise good record for the year was the unusually large number of violent deaths among students," his report continued. Three students were victims of a fire in Canada during the Christmas vacation, two died in an automobile accident, and two ended their lives by carbon monoxide poisoning...
...includes thousands of lesser energy-yielders. Petroleum hydrocarbons (gasoline, kerosene, etc.) are the commonest aviation fuels only because they are plentiful, convenient and relatively cheap. Many other chemicals yield more energy. Hydrogen has the highest heat of combustion (52,000 B.T.U.* per lb.), but carbon is rather low (14.500 B.T.U. per lb.). Hydrocarbons, which contain both carbon and hydrogen, are therefore intermediate. Kerosene burned in jet engines yields only about 18,500 B.T.U...
...impractical because hydrogen is a gas that cannot be kept in the liquid state without extreme difficulty. Next best is to "liquefy" hydrogen by making it combine with some other element to form a conveniently liquid compound. Kerosene is such a liquid, but it contains too much low-energy carbon...
Fortunately, nature has provided a chemical element, boron, which can be forced with some difficulty to improve on carbon's performance. Boron has a high heat of combustion (25,000 B.T.U. per lb.), and it forms compounds that contain more energy-rich hydrogen than most hydrocarbons do. The heat of combustion of diborane (B2H6), for instance, is 31,000 B.T.U. per lb., almost twice as good as kerosene...
Cloud of Poison. But boron hydrides are bad actors. Besides being poisonous, they have a reputation for exploding spontaneously for no apparent reason. This disadvantage may have been overcome, but it is more likely that the best boron-containing fuels are compounds of boron with carbon, hydrogen and perhaps other elements. There is a long list of such compounds to choose from. A boron-carbon-hydrogen compound would not be quite so powerful as a straight boron hydride, but it might be a pleasanter playmate...