Beyond The Sugar Snake - Explosive Carbon

ah so I've been asked quite a lot of times to look at this and it's the production of carbon snakes I think people want to have a relatively easy method to make a high surface area of carbon so I've looked at three methods and to be honest they're just fun to do so I thought I'd give it a go and do those three methods for you and you could have a look at the carbons that they produce and maybe use those carbons in batteries or something like that there are three methods of chosen are one is a relatively safe method if you like emitters use a virgin fluid so it's not tremendously safe the other ones sort of a mildly scary method in that it uses sulfuric acid and the final one is super scary because it uses a poisoned sulfuric acid and has an explosive reaction it's very cool and I'm going to do that one last and I probably got a step away while it actually reacts so you can see yeah you see in the reaction but the first one I'm going to start with is this one now it's a really well-known reaction and it produces a carbon snake and here we have 50 grams of normal table sugar and here we have 30 milliliters of sulfuric acid and if I call that sulfuric acid into that table sugar a carbon snake will fall now it doesn't happen immediately okay takes a little bit so I'm running about it give it a stir talk about it a little bit and that's plenty it'll start you'll see it change color from the sugar to a golden brown then black then they'll start spitting and bubbling and it'll start writing up they're giving off lots of fumes there's a sugar is basically made of carbon hydrogen oxygen what the sulfuric acid does is it also hydrogen oxygen off recombined it has water and we get an awful lot of steam coming off of that and that reaction creates voids in me add molten sugar as it gets really really hot you'll notice on the ceramic tile and the fire blanket because it gets hot you can see it starting to go Brown it will start to go black in a moment or two and then that reaction will happen and they're producing off a lot of fumes and they'll be sulfuric acid on those fumes so it will make you cough while that one's going this next one which is the if you like relatively safe one now in there what we've got is authoritative sugar again but it's mixed in a ratio of four-to-one with baking soda in this one as it burns and gets hot the sugar Madson into caramel the baking soda bread down increases travel day outside which is exactly what it's supposed to do it's what it does in your cooking but you need to fuel with that and in there we've got a little bit of isopropyl alcohol and that's going to be the fool again it takes a little bit of time to get going so I've got here a tray of sand I put on my ceramic brick I mean the poor the fuel in there I'm gonna put the sugar mix in there and basically set a light to the alcohol and the alcohol begins to burn milk sugar break the carbon hydrogen carbonate down and we'll see a nice black snake forming which is a good quantity of fuel there you see that's not what begins on black butter sugar and baking soda mix on there and then white that should go to spill sorry I'm just making something a taper so like that this and we'll just leave that to burn and do its job you can see that's now going black and little didn't start to bubble as this one starts to cook we'll get a count of snake rising out of that now the final one is this one now in these we've got about 50 grams here we've got about 15 and 20 grams there but here we've only got about 4 grams of material it's that yellow powder what about yellow powder is is that full nitro Emmeline it's a precursor to dyes so they make a lot of this stuff but in itself that is in fact poisonous now this reaction takes a little bit to get going so what we need to do with it when we wanted to get going is heated so put it on a tripod and I put it on a Bunsen burner and to that night your aniline all I'm going to do is add some sulfuric acid and here's some 96 percent sulfuric acid the sulfuric acid we added there incidentally was also at 96% and it can seen here they were beginning to grow our carbon snake already as that burns and you can see the carbon snake forming here and that's where the sugar is burning but it's trap the carbon dioxide from the carbon snake is actually forming this one we don't put much sulfuric acid in here incidentally the Frog ground nuts but we only need 2 milliliters of sulfuric acid give that a little bit of a stir you can see that one is the formed carbon snake now there's all the water fumes and the acid fumes coming off so I'm in a particularly well ventilated area and that one will go its and bubble and rise up you can see here we're forming our nice carbon snake now from the burning experiment where we're using baking soda mixed in with the sugar and isopropyl alcohol we're going to save this one until these two have gotten going because this is the one where I want to be out of the way of it so I'm going to wait until these are done a little bit then I'm going to get out of the way and just leave that to react now as that rebuttal is what we'll do is polymerize to go back and it will react suddenly so you want to keep your eye on that to see that reaction because it is sudden dramatic and explosive and it's pretty awesome to be honest and here we go here's our carbon snake forming from our baking soda sugar and isopropyl alcohol so there's arsenic forming from the sugar and sulfuric acid mix this one obviously you wanting to use that carbon then it's going to be pretty contaminated with sulfuric acid actually so even the dispersion of that is going to be a bit difficult and need care because like I said a lot of sulfuric acid still add in that this one obviously is just burnt sugar and baking soda it's incredibly light actually they'll grow quite long and it produces this incredibly light carbon here which is the black ram's horn you can see forming there okay we're going to do this one now so let's get the Bunsen burner on okay I'm going to get out of the way now you keep your eye on that wasn't that awesome this is a particular favorite of mine actually and as I say you won't have seen that anywhere else probably this uses like so for alike for natural Emmeline bottle of milliliters and super-short uric acid no dear this one's going beautifully this is your safe method and here is the Calvin snake we made with sulfuric acid all of these are pretty good ways of making caramel but some of these really don't have experiments you shouldn't actually be doing this is probably surfaced because it just uses mass control dependence there goes by fire alarm like I said does create some of the pyramids anyway I hope there is a pinkness and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 20,809

Keywords: carbon, nitroaniline, sugar, snake, chemistry, chemical, reaction, exploding, explosion, dangerous, mad, science, scientist, experiment, experimental, materials, fwg, robert, murray-smith, fun, weird, technology

Id: LZMwAzaeGA8

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 22 2019