Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: PeonForHer Doesn't ammonium nitrate smell strongly of old piss, Aswad? Not very. It has a faint ammonia smell about it, if you stir up some dust or heat it a lot. Doesn't fully dissociate until well above the boiling temp of water, though, so there shouldn't be much in the way of free ammonia. Not at a temperature humans can stand, in any case. And stirring up dust is inadvisable in the first place, since it is going to give you one hell of a headache if you inhale much dust. The nitronium ion causes blood vessels to dilate, as in any nitro compound (e.g. amyl nitrate causes a light headache for this reason). In a cold pack, there is an outer bag with calcium ammonium nitrate, and an inner bag with the water. Crushing the inner bag frees the water so it starts to dissolve the prills, lowering the temperature. The rate at which it dissolves is temperature dependent, so it can last a long time. When the bag is no longer cooling, the nitrate is fully dissolved and the water has to be evaporated to reuse it. But as for any smell one might worry about, the bag would take care of that problem. If the bag ruptures, you have to take it off anyway, since a small quantity will be absorbed through the skin and cause a nitro headache otherwise. AN cold packs are one of the main sources of nitrates in countries where fertilizer access is restricted, like Norway. Course, after cold packs were banned, we moved on to using air and electricity- those ain't been banned yet. IWYW, β Aswad.
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"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way. We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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