Blue gas
Blue gas was a variant of the town gas that was first produced in Germany from 1903 and was the first liquid gas .
The inventor was the pharmacist and chemist (student of Adolf von Baeyer ) Hermann Blau (1871–1944), after whom the gas was named. He made attempts to separate gas mixtures and produced a luminous gas that, unlike town gas, had no toxic components in the form of carbon monoxide . It was shipped in steel bottles and was used for lighting, cooking, and heating in a manner similar to propane gas bottles , from which it was eventually displaced after World War I when propane was marketed as a by-product of gasoline production. In 1903, Blau received a patent for his invention and the first factory was built in Augsburg- Oberhausen on Auerstrasse in collaboration with the entrepreneurLudwig August Riedinger .
At around 62.8 MJ per cubic meter, the gas has a higher calorific value than coal gas and consists of half olefins , 37% methane and paraffins , 6% hydrogen and air. A bottle cost one and a half Reichsmarks in 1916. A steel cylinder held 212 m³ of gas at a pressure of around 100 bar and was sufficient as a light source for about fourteen days. It had particular advantages in places where town gas could not be reached via pipes, such as remote castles, mountain huts, lighthouses and buoys, in trains, ships and on motor vehicles.
It was obtained from the thermal decomposition of hydrocarbons (especially distillates from lignite and oil shale , but also other mineral oils). In contrast to the procedure for oil gas, which was produced by the Pintsch company from 1909, was also shipped in steel bottles and had distillation temperatures of 900 to 1000 degrees Celsius in order to gasify the oil as completely as possible, the blue gas process used lower temperatures of 550 ° C up to 600 ° C and a stronger pre-compression. Easily condensable (petrol-like) hydrocarbons were separated out (initially by additional cooling) before the final compression took place in the liquefied gas bottles.
In 1908 the Deutsche Blaugasgesellschaft was converted into a GmbH and factories were established in Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, St. Petersburg, in the USA, Canada and Cuba. In Holland and Denmark, factories were built especially for lighthouses. Soon there were similar processes and products in competition with blue gas (oil gas from 1909). Displaced from the market by electricity and propane, the Augsburg factory closed in 1933 (the main plant was relocated to Northern Germany). But blue gas was once again used as gas for zeppelins, which is why a factory was established in Friedrichshafen in 1929 . The gas was about as dense as air and therefore had great advantages as a fuel for zeppelins (see buoyancy compensation ). It was used in the LZ 127 from 1928 to 1937 (partly mixed with butane and propane).
In 2013, the former blue gas factory in Augsburg made headlines when contaminated sites (contamination of the soil with PAHs ) on the former factory site became known.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Patent DE158198 : Process for the production of a high-quality shippable luminous gas from distillation gases . Registered on November 3, 1903 , published February 11, 1905 , inventor: Hermann Blau.
- ↑ According to the Gaswerk-Augsburg website, see web links. According to Bernhard Neumann, Textbook of Chemical Technology and Metallurgy, Springer 1939, p. 156, it consisted of 48% heavy and 36% light hydrocarbons, 6% hydrogen, 2% carbonic acid and 8% air.
- ↑ Sander: About the extraction and use of blue gas. In: Polytechnisches Journal . 331, 1916, pp. 155-162. Based on the article by Hugo Lieber in Metallurgical and Chemical Engineering, Volume 12, p. 153.
- ↑ Klaus Utzni: When it comes to blue gas, environmentalists see red. 80 years after a factory was shut down, groundwater is in danger . Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, April 5, 2013.