^
"I would point out that a lot of diesel engines don't actually manage to ignite diesel with pure compression. they need glow plugs until the heads get hot enough to sustain the compression ignition."
True, but that's for cold-starting conditions. where there's iinitial heat loss to the cold surrounding steel. It would not be necessary if the designed compression ratio were higher, but this involves more stress on the engine parts. Put it this way, if sudden compression to, say, 25 or 30 atmosphere will ignite diesel, sudden compression to 380 atmospheres will get it hot enough to ignite anything. I might jokingly add that it could be hot enough to sustain fusion reactions... <big grin, har-de-har-har.>
^
"...interesting side note: Glancing at the vaporization temperature of water at pressure tables I don't see any that hit 380 atm, but at 220 atm it's 375*C. Eyeballing the math, it's in the realm of possible that the air bubbles got hot enough that they boiled the water compressing them and there were some *very* short lived steam pockets before they cooled and re-condensed."
That's why I offered the possibility of ummm... let's say an oscillating bubble throwing crap all over. (That 375°C at 220 Atm steam pressure seems low. No tables, no math, just my left eyebrow raised itself.)
There are enough rapid dynamically-changing extreme circumstances in this playbook that any change in any assumption changes most the other assumptions and there are too many un-assessed variables so that attaining "truth" requires a couple of Crays or extensive empirical testing with a tightly limited number of "variable variables." (Egad,Terry, did you actually say that? For shame, Shane!)
But fun to play with them based on what evidence is available. Too bad such tragic circumstances are involved.
Terry, 230RN