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Punctures are hard to find so fill the inner tube with a vividly
coloured gas and you will quickly see where it is escaping
from. The gas could come in carbon dioxide style cylinders.
Or it could be a really smelly gas and you could sniff out the
leak. Or it could be a flammable gas and you could
find it
using a naked flame.
Phosphine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphine
Pyrophoric; ignites spontaneously. [8th of 7, Jun 24 2019]
[link]
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I suppose ideally a really smelly, vividly coloured and
flammable gas. |
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Just look for the hole; the puncture will be nearby. |
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To a certain extent, a torus such as an inner tube is topologically similar to a sphere, in that they both have a single surface without edges. |
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This opens up the possibility of finding the hole mathematically. |
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First, map the n-manifold which is the innertube (torus) to a corresponding sphere. Then reduce the sphere to a point. Et viola ! That point must contain the puncture. |
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Repairing the puncture is then trivial, so we leave it as an exercise for the reader. |
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But if there's a puncture, it's no longer a torus. Which, in any
case, is not topologically equivalent to a sphere. |
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Precisely. All that's needed is to map the location of the discontinuity. |
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Alternatively make ordinary atmosphere visible by placing the
inner tube in a clear fluid so you can see the bubbles it makes
as it escapes through the puncture, H2O is fairly common &
readily available, maybe that would suffice? |
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No - insufficiently volatile/reactive/flammable. |
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I was worried that might be a bit of a problem.. how about if
we add some powdered magnesium to it? |
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If you use a powdered potassium inside the tube and fill the tire with a pure nitrogen gas, then you'd know about a leak because the potassium would ignite as soon as it made contact with the air. |
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Also, changing the tire would be much easier as the old leaky one would likely burn itself off the wheel. |
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A physical action of [8th]'s mathematics would be to make an origami of the inner tube, making fold steps that reduce the warped ?sphere? until gas doesn't remain, isolating the spatial wormhole. |
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Surely the problem here is that the medium used to fill the tyres is of the same phase as that which the bicycle is moving through. Thus, I suggest the use of different phases - by having the tyres filled with a pressurised liquid when cycling along the road, or by filling the tyres with air but only cycling underwater. Either of these would make puncture detection a trivial task. |
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How about a radioactive gas that emits radiation
incapable of penetrating the
rubber of the tyres? |
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Argon 39 and Argon 42 look promising with big half
lives, beta radiation, and the
added bonus of Potassium or ultimately Calcium as
the decay product. |
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A Geiger counter will find the leak and, of course,
a ready supply of the correct
Argon would be required to get you on your way,
since the use of air might cause a
problem with any Potassium unless it's reacted
with the tyres already. |
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I can't see any problems whatsoever with this. |
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Sheer genius. The Argon will be unreactive with its decay product. |
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//radiation incapable of penetrating the rubber of the
tyres?// //beta radiation// |
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Beta will get through tyres quite easily. What you need is a
combination of a beta emitter and a label that says "Don't
worry." |
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You could go with alpha, but I seem to recall that alpha
detectors are more expensive and/or less sensitive, and
you'd have to scan the whole surface of the tube quite
carefully to pick it up. |
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I couldn't find a suitable gas that emitted alpha
particles. My search was extensive, and lasted a
good five minutes. |
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How about we have an optional upgrade to the
tyres to include something to block the beta
particles in exchange for the "Don't Worry" label? |
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Those cunning nuclear science boffins have a
scintillating idea for something that glows when
irradiated, but they won't tell me what it is. |
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// I couldn't find a suitable gas that emitted alpha particles // |
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Radon. Coat the inner wall if the tube with thorium isotopes ;the primary decay product is 222Rn, with a half-life of 96 hours and a copious alpha emitter. |
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This definitely opens the door for some up market spoke beads or some scintillating treads for the cruiser. |
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