[citation][nom]Orion5289[/nom]I'm an engineer for an industrial gas company and we make liquid nitrogen along with many other atmospheric gases/liquids. Nitrogen is an inert gas so its not flammable but its still dangerous because of cryogenic burns (if it gets on your skin) and it can definitely kill you from asphyxiation. Good thing you guys did this outside, it would be super dangerous to do anything with liquid nitrogen inside.If you wanted to get super crazy, you should have used liquid helium. Liquid nitrogen is around -320F but helium is -452F (only 4 degrees Kelvin). Its actually the coldest liquid known to man. I have no idea if it would work in place of the nitrogen and its very expensive so its probably not a good idea.[/citation]
The Thursday and Friday nights prior to the competition we did prepare by benching with our own LN2 in enclosed spaces (well, the window in the hotel room was open). It would take A LOT of nitrogen vapors to displace enough oxygen to become a real threat, so an open window is sufficient.
Most HW has issues running colder than about -150C, so liquid helium become superflous. LN2 is pretty cold...when we got our GPU down to -186C and it didn't "cold bug" we were amazed.