Hydrogen alone just makes a soft pop; as you say, for a bang it needs to be mixed with oxygen prior to ignition.
>you'd be amazed at the bang a litter bag filled with a hyd/ox mixture can produce if set alight.
Try a large garbage bag with oxyacetylene mix (do not try this at home).
I guess - never having tried the party balloon trick myself - that such a small amount of hydrogen will mix well enough with the surrounding air as the balloon pops to create a (modest, at least) bang as the mix ignites, but this is just conjecture.
Maybe I'll have to do some empi research one of these days - we do have a few bottles of oxygen and acetylene in the workshop at my current employer.
Hey ho, time for an engineer to pay our welders a visit.
Safety first!
Re:iPhones are allergic to helium
by Florin_Andrei on Wednesday October 31, 2018 @03:15PM
(#18348482)
This led - in addition to lots and lots of eardrum-splitting workshop pranks - the occasional kids' party balloons being inflated with hydrogen. (As it was free, which He definitely isn't. HS&E be damned.)
A then colleague of mine claimed they'd cracked a window and caused instant panic at his son's birthday party when a bright spark decided to put a balloon to a lit candle to show the other kids it'd pop.
I doubt the cracked window (given a standard party balloon is pretty small - and a cracked window would likely mean lots of -ahem- eardrum deficiency in the assembled crowd) - but I can imagine it got the kids' attention all right when the balloon more or less exploded.
(We did crack a couple of windows in the workshop, though - you'd be amazed at the bang a litter bag filled with a hyd/ox mixture can produce if set alight.)