Our first 10′ tall carbon flower with a 42″ diameter bloom.  Here’s a video showing what the flowers look like before trimming and stem attaching.  This stem is also our first one made of pure carbon fiber.  We used a biaxial twill sleeve from Soller Composites and laid it up over foam pool noodles.  After applying epoxy the stretchy sleeve is folded to create a ribbing effect similar to bamboo.

Back in 2003 my maniac friends and I thought it would be fun to start blowing bubbles with oxygen and acetylene and exploding them with a tiki torch. Who knew those were the early days of The Hydrogen Economy!

After a minute of cleaning up the playa dust from Burning Man, and playing on the river at Priceless, we are now home, semi-rested and are happy to report that the desert was good. Setup took three days in the hot sun, cold nights, and ever-present dust. Everything broke, such as manifolds, flashback arrestors, needle valves, flow meters, flame effects, bubble machines, circuit boards. But Burning Man requires improvisation and we kept our projects up and running all week.

We took The Hydrogen Economy to new heights.

PyroCardium’s heartbeats of fire pulsed far across the playa.

People liked to explode hydrogen bubbles.

And everyone wanted to know how PyroCardium works.

Toxic Bloom, lit up with four colors of fire triggered by that old memory game “Simon”.

PyroCardium, our newest interactive fire sculpture was a hit at Fire Arts Festival. 40 flame effects igniting in quick succession all around you every time your heart beats. Just pick up the stethoscope, place it on your chest, and the flames will certainly send an adrenaline shot that will amp up your pulse. Resuscitation please!

KTVU did a nice piece including False Profit Labs. You can watch the video here: http://www.ktvu.com/video/16839645/index.html

PyroCardium at Fire Arts Festival

The Hydrogen Economy was also in full effect with brand new modularized entirely clear plastic bubble machines. More bubbles, more explosions. And finally, the appropriate labels to add to the propane and oxygen knobs. You see, the bubbles are always full of hydrogen, but adding a bit of oxygen makes them go boom, and adding propane makes them flash.

Hydrogen Economy Control Panel

Enjoying a few exploding bubbles.

Watch the video.

Reporter: “So then what application do you have, besides the entertainment factor?”

Brett: “Wait, what?”

Brendan: “OTHER than the entertainment factor? What are you talking about?”

Brett: “Don’t get me started on the transition between the sense of human curiosity–”


Reporter: “No no, that’s excellent–”

Brett: “To explore the physical properties of nature–”

Reporter: “Right, but don’t you have something like, it’ll replace rocket ships to go to the moon?”


Brendan: “No it’s more like, even on the moon people will need something fun to do… and slightly dangerous. It’s more along those lines.”

False Profit Labs is proud to bring The Hydrogen Economy and PyroCardium to Maker Faire. Especially now that our circuitboards work! The last few days have been a bit harrowing, since the first time we fired up all twenty of our the flame effects, we blew up our power supply. Kurt Thorn revisioned the electronics in 24 volts DC instead of the high-voltage AC line we were using and at 11:30pm last night PyroCardium came to life.

We’re jamming a lot of technology into this project of computer-controlled fire. The little sculpture is a prototype, with a 20-foot-tall spiral to follow for Burning Man in August. It has 16 flame effects, each a small propane venturi flame pipe with a solenoid valve. All the flames are fired individually by a USB-connected driver board controlled by a False Profit Labs software application that runs various flame algorithms. Each algorithm changes the response and patterns of the flame. And at Maker Faire on Saturday from 6-10pm you can place the PyroCardium stethoscope on your chest and see your heartbeat race up the sculpture in a spiral of flames.

PyroCardium’s first test-run

When planning to fill a large enclosed chamber with hydrogen, oxygen and propane, and allow members of the public to voluntarily ignite the contents, we find it’s best to consider ways to decrease the likelihood of blasting out four foot by eight foot sheets of shattered polycarbonate at hundreds of feet per second. If you plan on igniting flammable gases for amazement and amusement (read: art), you really have to consider safety third, and certainly no lower than that.

We’ve taken a number of measures to reduce the risk of life and limb, the most important of which is the hydrogen chamber itself. There’s a lot less chance of someone burning their hand, face, neck, neck, chest or faux fur costume if they are physically separated from the fire by a plastic barrier.

But again we come back to the question: How do we avoid blowing up the chamber? The key is to understand what the maximal flow rate in cubic feet per minute (cfm) is of our bubble blowing devices, and the flash point of hydrogen. Hydrogen becomes flammable in air at concentrations of just 4%. So we built an air blower and duct system that creates positive pressure inside the chamber at roughly 50-100 times our hydrogen usage. In our case, our bubble machines will consume 3-4cfm of hydrogen. Therefore we have installed a blower system that will push around 400cfm of air into the chamber. This reduces the maximum hydrogen concentration in the chamber to less than 2%. In addition, we’ve mounted many nichrome ignitors (see Ben’s last post) to ignite any small pockets of hydrogen, either contained by or not contained by bubbles, before they can collect into a dangerous situation.

How would we know if a dangerous situation occurs before the gigantic explosion? We mount a detector on the wall of our chamber, at a level where we would want to shut down the project if gas somehow pooled from the ceiling down to the detector mount point. If the detector goes off, the project is shut down until the chamber returns to safe levels.

A couple of weeks ago, Erik did some great drawings of the hydrogen chamber in Rhino. Since then, we’ve been working to refine the design (uhh, we forgot a door… can we add one?) and build out the first level.  It was also cool to have Erik show us how he works in Rhino. The software combines the manipulation and viewing power of a 3d modeler like Maya with the accuracy and dimensioning capabilities of a CAD program. Perfect combination for this kind of work.

So far, first the six steel frames are welded, the aluminum for the surrounds is cut and drilled, and yesterday I got about half of the brackets welded on. It’s cool to see our physical work starting to look like the 3d model!

False Profit Labs has received grants from Burning Man for both The Hydrogen Economy and PyroCardium. We’re honored and really excited. Even though we’ve come a long way on the projects, there is much work to be done. I think that along with these grants comes the responsibility to deliver, and to bring what we’ve promised in our proposals to life out on the playa.

Since we had to put the proposals online quickly for this week’s Jack Rabbit Speaks (JRS), I dumped images out of the proposal PDF files and made these online versions.

The Hydrogen Economy
PyroCardium

I didn’t have much luck with the PDF to HTML conversion tools, so if you know of a good one, please post it.

False Profit Labs is happy to announce that we will be making appearances around the Bay Area in the coming months. First, on April 12 you can come out to NASA Ames at Moffett Field and enjoy our fire art out on the tarmac in celebration of Yuri’s Night. Check out their website here: www.ynba.org.Then on May 3 & 4 we bring more explosions to Maker Faire at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. More on this at: www.makerfaire.com.We’ll publish more details as we get them, but for now here’s an appetizing 3d model that Brendan Colloran made in Matlab(!) for the PyroCardium scultpure. Now it’s just a matter of building it.