Exotic Thermites

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thermite's are chemical reactions that we all know and love but did you know that thermite's are actually a lot more diverse than your typical iron and aluminum stuff well today we're going to look at some of the more exotic and angry versions of thermite so I hope you enjoyed this video first let's start with a classic so right here is your typical iron thermite it's about three parts red iron oxide in one part aluminum by weight of course now it actually has a really high activation energy which means it's very hard to light on fire so I mixed up some starter mix so we can get it to go now to show you how insensitive thermite is I'm going to light it with his torch here see as you can tell it took quite a while to get that thing to go this torch is hot I filled this hole with about a pound of thermite and then about five grams of my thermite starting mixed I'm guessing that that splattering is occurring from a little explosions caused by the liquid iron hitting water in the ground those little red glowing nodules there are actually molten iron and down in there you can see they're really hot iron that was formed by that reaction if you do the thermochemical calculations on the classic thermite you see that release is about four thousand kilojoules per kilogram now to put things in perspective if you could somehow take all of that energy and put it into moving a baseball you could accelerate a baseball to about seven thousand four hundred ten meters per second or about sixteen and a half thousand miles per hour so that should give you some insight on exactly how energetic this stuff is here are some iron chunks that I was able to collect from that last reaction pretty cool stuff right so next we're going to look at something that's a little bit more angry thermate the military decided that thermite just doesn't burn quite hot enough for some applications so they decide to piss off the original thermite mix by adding some barium nitrate and sulfur now these chemicals definitely increase the burn temperature but it's at the cost of using up some of the liquid iron that's produced in the reaction now unfortunately this mixture is quite toxic in fact in this thermite charge right here there's enough soluble barium to kill about four adult humans but I don't plan on eating it anytime soon so I should be okay let's see if this thermate can get hot enough to burn through this steel container here it reduced that container into a puddle that was pretty awesome the claim temperature of this stuff is 2200 degrees Celsius or about 4000 Fahrenheit now let's look at some of the more exotic thermite compositions but first we have to look into the chemistry so in a typical thermite reaction you have a more reactive metal knocking out a less reactive metal that's bound to oxygen giving you that free metal in the end and in this case this is your typical thermite which uses aluminum and iron oxide but in reality this metal can be anything as long as it's more reactive than the metal that's bound to oxygen this table of standard electrode potentials can be found in about any general chemistry textbook and it gives lots of insight on things like electroplating and battery design and even in our case designing exotic thermite's so yeah it may look a little bit crazy to somebody who doesn't know that much chemistry but if you notice in some of these reactions there's metals listed now metals listed closer to the bottom of the page are more more reactive than ones listed to the top so for thermite if you have a metal down here and a metal oxide that's above it that means that that thermite reaction could probably happen if it's the other way around or your metal oxide of interest is down here and your metals up here that means that your thermite reaction probably won't happen I'm lucky in the fact that I've accumulated a lot of scaring dangerous chemicals over the years and so I have plenty of metals to do some thermite with so the standard metal is aluminum here which is a fairly good reducing agent then I have some magnesium powder which is a little bit more angry then over here I have some sodium metal which is incredibly reactive as well as some lithium metal which is actually the king of reactivity so yeah we can make some interesting thermite's with these this is about 20 grams of thermite made with magnesium and manganese dioxide so I'm curious to see how this stuff acts it was hard to capture just how bright that manganese thermite was so I made it a separate charge and I'm going to video it from a different angle that was pretty cool here's some copper oxide and magnesium thermite let's see how this stuff goes well unfortunately both of those copper and manganese thermite's burn too quickly to leave any metal residue oh well in order to try some of the more crazy thermite I get to break into my alkali metal set so here's some lithium metal and it's uh that liquid in there is just some mineral oil it protects it from air and water then here is some sodium metal got about an ounce in this container it never ceases to amaze me how soft sodium metal is I can just bend it with my fingers there it feels almost like clay but I have to wear gloves because otherwise it would quickly react with the water in my skin releasing a bunch of heat and also making very caustic sodium hydroxide I have to cut it up into tiny pieces here that way there's more surface area to react with my other metal oxide so I'm going to cut it up into some little chunks here and then put it under mineral oil and here is the finely divided sodium now I better pack this stuff away before it decides to auto-ignite on me here's the finely divided lithium it looks like there's a lot there but in reality this is only about three grams it's just that lithium is extremely low density so I have about seven grams of sodium in this container and I want to react it with this sand here which is silicon dioxide so according to my calculations I need about four and a half grams of sand in here to react fully with the sodium I just weighed out 16 grams of calcium oxide here which is quicklime and I'll be mixing that with lithium chips the thermochemical calculations for the silicon dioxide and sodium thermite show a surprising result the reaction is actually unfavorable at standard conditions but if you use the Gibbs free energy equation you find that the reaction does become favorable about 482 degrees Celsius so that just means we need to get at very very hot for the reaction to go but even more surprising is that with the lithium and calcium oxide there right the reaction is never favorable so that means I'm just going to heat it up really hot with a bunch of thermite starter mix to see if we can get any pretty colors from the lithium and calcium atomic emission I ended up initiating the reaction by simply dumping some water onto that mixture the highly reactive sodium in there reacts violently with water and was able to successfully ignite the mixture I hope you all enjoyed the change of pace or my typical laser videos but you know what's funny my education is actually in chemistry so I'm really more knowledgeable on this stuff that I am lasers which is you know pretty funny considering my video content for the past decade but I do plan on posting some more crazy videos in the future both with my giant laser bazooka as well as some crazy chemistry stuff so be sure to subscribe and also I would be happy for suggestions if you have any suggestions on stuff that I should do in the future let me know I have some free time this summer and I'd love to give some new videos I shot well yeah please subscribe and I check out my other videos thanks for watching

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Channel: styropyro

Views: 535,843

Rating: 4.9557295 out of 5

Keywords: exotic, thermite, thermate, powder, fire, pyrotechnics, p chem

Id: GRSlGt26uUA

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 8min 58sec (538 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 14 2016

Reddit Comments

This seems perfect for high school students. Is that what you were aiming for.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Duvelthehobbit 📅︎︎ Jun 16 2016 🗫︎ replies