Hi everyone, welcome back to Cody's lab So today I wanted to make thermite but challenged myself to use aluminum foil rather than the aluminum powder normally used 'luminum foil is after all still rather popular on YouTube, right? So this will be probably a lot more difficult due to the larger, you know thickness of the particle it's all one particle, but I still think I can do it. So let's give it a shot, shall we? So to get started, I've placed approximately 2 square nano light seconds of aluminum foil out onto the table This has a mass of approximately 5 times 10 to the 24th AMU and I have also measured out the correct Stoichiometric amount of iron oxide to react with it roughly three times the mass of aluminum in order to have a successful reaction, the two materials must be in intimate contact If they are not touching each other, if they are not in close contact, they will never react. Also, we need a high activation energy, and the activation energy, the lower the better. We can connect them. So what I'm doing is Mixing a little bit of water in with the iron oxide So as to make a slurry that I can spread around on the foil You might have noticed this is shiny side down The dull side is a little bit rougher So it should adhere to the iron just a little bit better. For the uninitiated Thermite is a mixture of a metal and a metal oxide. Given the right conditions this undergoes a redox reaction in which the oxygen switches its allegiance to the more reactive metal and releasing loads of energy in the process. Okay. So here we go. Looks like it's a pretty well spread The iron is very dense. And so the layer is actually quite thin So now we got to remove the water. So let's go take this and put it in the oven So, here we are, just push that into the oven Now before you start thinking about saving energy and drying this out just in the air Iron oxide absorbs water and it actually chemically reacts with it to form a hydrate and that hydrate doesn't break down Until the temperature is quite high so it does Actually have to be oven-dried It shouldn't take too long and there is no chance of it igniting inside the oven because the activation energy for this reaction is a lot higher than what I can produce just with this thing. So now that the foil has been oven dried. You can see that it's a little less red But now we don't have any water that's gonna be vaporizing and Producing gas and also absorbing heat. So now we want this to be as close as possible to a powdered mixture but one of our materials is not a powder so we can't just mix it Fortunately, we already have the iron stuck to the aluminum. And it'd be nice if we had the aluminum on both sides of the iron. So let's just roll it up So the difference between powder and this foil it's kind of like the difference between trying to light dry grass on fire Or lighting a piece of plywood on fire Both are perfectly possible to light But the dry grass only requires a spark or a lit cigarette Thrown into it Whereas a piece of plywood requires sustained heating for long periods of time You can't just use a match on it So what I'm doing here is essentially chopping up the plywood into smaller pieces so it more resembles the dry grass Okay. I'm just folding this over. So the iron oxide is completely Encapsulated by the aluminum. So now I'm going to take my rusty foil burrito and Run it through this roller mill This will smash the aluminum and iron together forcing them to be in better contact The iron oxide is actually in the form of small crystals and I'm basically embedding those crystals into the aluminum Also, this is gonna make the aluminum thinner so it's like taking your plywood and separating the plies making it Easier to light. So hopefully by the end of this it'll be more resembling cardboard I probably won't get it that thin but Any amount of thinning will help You could do this with a hammer. I presume but that kind of energy on the impact. You might actually be risking a spontaneous ignition. After running it through a few times the aluminum is getting quite brittle and has started to crack And what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna kind of fold it in on itself Fold it in half and once more And there we are Have smashed together a few times you can see the aluminum is becoming quite brittle In fact, if I were to keep going this I might end up with a powdered mixture Let's go hit this with the torch and see if it'll light For ignition. I will be using an oxyacetylene torch because Little blow torch just won't cut it There we go. I'm just gonna kind of hit it at the edge I think that's Pretty decent thermite reaction. It's not very quick But it did consume the entire thing So, I think that's pretty good Now the iron is in little beads strewn all throughout it but I think but I think if we did more and had a way to You know conserve heat we might be able to do something with that So as you can see the sun's already starting to come up, but I've got the same thing I had before Multiplied by 10. I've also got it sitting inside of a crucible So is to conserve heat - that way, it'll stay liquid longer, hopefully So let's get this lit up and see what happens Okay It's off It just went out let's try that again There we go. Now we're rocking Okay We can pour that out Actually broke my crucible Let's have a look at this down here Yeah, there's our slag and there's the iron Okay Yeah, it is iron, it's very brittle though it just snapped like a, oh, like a piece of glass or something That is our iron It's still rather hot. That's probably one reason why it broke so easily Yeah, it's highly contaminated with gases and stuff There you go, it's a pretty good proof of concept I think That is thermite using aluminum foil Hope you enjoyed I'll see you next time! See if I can roast a marshmallow over this superheated thermite slag Looks like it's getting a little brown Ooop! It lit - Let me zoom out Mmm! Toasty!
That's no crazy scientist, that's Cody...... Oh wait...