Just read about this the other day and I still don’t understand
1. what hydraulic fluid exactly is and what it’s for
2. why it can be so dangerous when you mess with it
In: 11
Well if you atomize it, it can be very flammable. Source:had a pinhole leak that was ignited by welding spark which shut down our plant for a month after burning up the fiberglass roof, wall, and all our wiring.
A) The ELI5 answer is that its just oil. Normal oil. But its used in hydraulic systems, eg extending a ram on an excavator.
B) The ELI5 answer is that its not dangerous. Its no more dangerous than cooking oil. However, lets go back to that ram – lets say a leak came in the hydraulic pipe which brings the hydraulic oil to that ram, and the ram has 14 tonnes of weight pressurizing it. Well, the oil exiting from that leak will be like a bullet. It will go straight through you if you are in the way. Even if you live, oil + meat = cancer.
It’s a fluid optimized to have low viscosity, low freezing point, high boiling point, and some lubricant properties.
Translated into chemistry, you make it with cancerous stuff plus acid plus some poison plus some toxic thing covered in irritant stuff.
It will give you cancer and burn your skin and poison you and intoxicate you. This are the hazards, then it doesn’t happen that quick, you have to wash it away and you’ll be fine but never play around with it.
In a system, it is generally found at temperatures that may burn your skin, and at pressure that may spray the thing fast enough to actually make holes into you. That quite scary, don’t play with hyd systems if you don’t know what you are doing.
It’s rare to get injured, but the hazards are numerous and you need to play safe, that’s why they strap so many warnings on those things.
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