And yet another, another weird corrosion story (not synth rel ated)

[Goddard, Duncan]

>>>Probable is that when the battery acid leaked, it corroded the
> battery and flashlight shell and made a conductive path
> shorting out the batteries, and the discharge current made them
> warm.<<<
> 
another war story- while I worked at brookside, we commissioned a company
called hunting-hivolt to build a truck for location work. they build radio
trucks and so forth for the armed services. while this was going on, they
overheard us discussing the most robust cells to buy for radio microphones-
we got through tons of pp3's in those days. kodak had just started marketing
their "duracell" rival, and these guys had, by coincidence, been involved in
evaluations of their own. these included dropping the cells onto concrete
and measuring them for signs of deterioration. perhaps wisely, I have
forgotten which of the rivals failed, but the story was that barrier
material within the cell had been mechanically damaged, allowing the
constituent chemicals to mix in a less-controlled fashion than in a normal
cell. they got very hot indeed.
the same guys told us of a land-rover dropped from a 'plane; normal practice
in some situations is to parachute vehicles into battle-zones. the 'chute
failed on this occasion, and the land-rover fell over 600 feet, landing
right-way up and bursting one tyre. it was driven away.

d.


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