This brought a huge grin to my face. I think I'll be smiling for the rest of the day, just thinking about it. It's wonderful to see people tinker and explo(r|d)e stuff!
I was hoping this would involve some sort of crazy energy transfer like cavitation heating or something. Still a neat project, but I'm sure there are better things to do with a functional pulse-jet.<p>This led me to wonder: what's the fastest (and at least hypothetically non-widespread-destructive[1]) method of boiling a kettle-sized volume (say, 1.5l or so) of water[4].<p>1.5l * 4.2kJ/l/K * (100 - 20)K =~ 500kJ energy required.<p>Exactly what sort of (practical) coupling achieves the most effective transfer is the purpose of the challenge.<p>Thoughts?<p>[1] in the spirit of the George Goble[2] approach to BBQ ignition optimisation using liquid oxygen[3]<p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Goble" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Goble</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.humournet.com/collage.archives/collage096.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.humournet.com/collage.archives/collage096.txt</a><p>[4] Trickery involving reduced pressure to achieve low-temp boiling are considered cheating. I"m not sure what the benchmark pressure would be though, since you'd probably want a high-pressure heating vessel in case you overshoot and vaporise it.
Another creation by Colin Furze here: the flame throwing scooter, which incidentally got him arrested.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UNr1XClnec" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UNr1XClnec</a><p>I wish I had the time to do pointless and dangerous things like this.
And there is always the Jet powered beer cooler : <a href="http://www.asciimation.co.nz/beer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.asciimation.co.nz/beer/</a><p>So now you can cook things or freeze them :-)