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Dehumidifying Antifire

Get that humidity out, fast.
 
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Humidity. It is a nuisance. Dehumidifiers work, but slowly, plugging away. There should be some way to instantly dehumidify a room, provided enough energy is used.

A fire can quickly remove all the oxygen in a room. To fuel the fire you need a substance which is relatively reduced (like gas). The fire is exothermic and so accelerates itself. This principle needs to be extended to create Antifire. The Antifire starts with a very oxidized substance, which will consume all available atmospheric water in the air as it is reduced. The air is rendered desert dry in under a minute. It may be be necessary to input a fair amount of energy into this to get adequate speed, so the Antifire generator may need one of those 220 volt dryer plugs.

bungston, Sep 03 2003

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       I'm not sure the Chemistry will work. Water is burnt Hydrogen, H2O. The only way to burn it will be to make peroxid, H2O2. Water will not burn to H2Os on its own and if you could coax into burning the resulting H2O2 will bleach everything in your room.
The other way round, reducing the water will leave H2 in the air, which explodes nicely.
  

       If you want the air dry fast fill a sprinkler with liquid nitrogen and spray a mist. It will dry everything real fast, but it will also get real cold.
kbecker, Sep 03 2003
  

       You take your dehumidification seriously. Build the room capable of withstanding one atm of external pressure. On the way out press the button starting a large high vacuum pump. Within a minute all moisture and dust will be gone. The automatic cycle will then refill the room with your favourite mixture of breathing gasses.
Fussass, Sep 03 2003
  

       Yeah, the vacuum pump approach would work the best, methinks.
bristolz, Sep 04 2003
  

       <disclaimer>If you try this, know that you were warned that it is a stupid & dangerous idea</disclaimer>
While looking around a junkheap, I found a nearly full 16 oz. propane cylinder. It being on a cold, rainywet day I figured I could have some fun without risk of burning up the remainder of the territory. I set up the cylinder on an old water heater, which was lying on its side. Walking off about 50 yards, I knelt behind a rock and attempted to touch off the bomb with a .22 rifle. What I got was not what I expected: a muffled "whump" and a huge cloud of fog, not flame. When I walked back over to the area, the water heater was coated with about an inch of ice, and there was ice on the ground for about thirty feet around.
  

       Well, you said "instantly"...
lurch, Sep 04 2003
  

       Cold air retains little humidity. Warm it up and pump it into the room.
FarmerJohn, Sep 04 2003
  

       I thought of lurch's anno here after watching Mythbusters, where they were shooting tanks of propane. It is too bad they made so little of the freezing power of the released gas - they obsessed on making the firey explosion. They even had Buster in a tux nearby with a martini glass in his hand. It would have been very nifty if Buster, instead of being immolated, emerged crusted with hoar-frost and his martini frozen solid.
bungston, Jan 18 2008
  

       An effective, if drastic, method of doing this would be a dry-powder fire extinguisher filled with microcrystalline sodium peroxide. This has an extremely strong affinity for CO2 and H2O, and releases oxygen in the process; but the reaction is extremely exothermic, and the stuff's horribly toxic and reactive.   

       A spray tower fed with concentrated sulphuric acid would be an equally good dehumidifier .....
8th of 7, Jan 18 2008
  
      
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