Hydrogen Peroxide: going all the way

[Music] hello we've done it we made it we're back for another episode of explosions and fire we did we actually did it so i was on a break to work on my phd thesis but now that i'm back i'm proud to announce i have completed my phd funding hydrobroxide features a very long oxygen oxygen bond which makes it very reactive and very unstable in many scenarios hydrogen peroxide can oxidize something and then turn back into water and it is sold as a solution in water and that's generally not an issue unless we wanted to do something a little bit more dangerous because water's very good at stabilizing things very good at absorbing heat so can we get hydrogen peroxide by itself without the water solution that is in and perhaps more importantly can we do that without dying i think we need to talk about all the different types of peroxide and what they're used for and their different reactivity it's all a bit confusing so i'm gonna use an analogy just to try and make things simpler so let's go with the great american pastime baseball so three to six percent is first base and it's not that exciting i mean it's good and it's useful in some scenarios it's not really dangerous the advantage of it is that you can you can really get anywhere you can get it at the local supermarket and you can show it on tv you know even even during the middle of the day it's safe enough no one's really going to get hurt 12 is second base we've got a lot more peroxide here which is good but it also comes with this disadvantages we really should start wearing protection here because you don't want to hurt your skin or anything like that second base can be quite damaging to skin as a lot of people who use it professionally would know especially over time it can really start to damage your skin third base is 32 once again we step up another level of hazard and we don't really want to work with this outside of a professional setting or an area set up to mitigate the hazards otherwise you can result in serious injuries and it is frustrating that going beyond second base is actually banned in most of europe at early 2020 due to safety concerns i think you can still go to third base in europe if you've got a license but i mean i don't know is that really gonna win the war on terror and that's as far as most chemists will go most chemists won't ever make it to fourth base 70 or more concentrated peroxide the only people i know that have to deal with fourth base are rocket scientists the parts of the internet i go on don't really have much information about what it's like but more importantly what about fifth base what about 90 how do we get to 90 there is one main way of concentrating hydroperoxide vacuum distillation however it's a little nuts contrary to popular belief i'm not actually insane i'm not just talking [ __ ] about vacuum distillations because i'm very bad at them although that definitely does come into it you think you'd be able to concentrate hydrogen peroxide by just boiling it and you'd boil all the water and the hydrogen peroxide which has a higher boiling point will stay behind but it doesn't really work like that the hydrogen peroxide and the water together have a different boiling point so they'll boil off together and also the heat you're providing to the solution will break down the hydrogen peroxide and then boil off that resulting water product the more concentrated the peroxide is the easier you will break down the peroxide so you can't ever reach a high concentration the idea behind vacuum distillation is you run the distillation under vacuum so the boiling point is a lot lower so you don't have to provide as much heat to the solution so you don't break down as much hydrogen peroxide the serious downside of this is the material you want the hydroperoxide is a higher boiling fraction and this matters because you have any impurities at all such as dust or organic stabilizers that have been added into the peroxide those are going to be concentrated with the peroxide as well so even under mild heat that boiling action with all the impurities and your concentrated peroxides is generally a very bad idea so i just didn't want to do vacuum distillation i'm not doing vacuum distillation it's too technical i'm [ __ ] at it it's a bad idea for once in my life i'm not doing the hard and fast route that potentially will kill me but we're going to try and find a safer route so our alternative method comes from a russian paper from 2002 what we're going to be doing is taking our peroxide and putting it into a container with a desiccant this desiccant the sulfuric acid is going to pull water from the atmosphere of the container and therefore the hydrogen peroxide and absorb that water concentrating the peroxide without heating it the disadvantage of this method is it does take quite a long time so i think the authors spent three days to a week getting the peroxide all the way up to 90 concentrated i mean three days isn't too bad right how long is a russian day much of northern russia is blanketed in sunlight nearly 24 hours a day for two months okay so we're going to try this and luckily enough i can get 50 peroxide at the local hydroponics store where it sold for like plants or something i have some from a long while ago it's been in the freezer so we need to check its concentration actually that's a very good point how do we know what the concentration of the peroxide actually is i mean i could do a titration but i'd give all of you high school flashbacks and i don't want to do that so what we're going to do instead is measure the gas volume right we can add some permanganate solution to the hydrogen peroxide measure the amount of oxygen coming off the solution by the displacement of water and then assuming ideal gas ideal temperature and spherical oxygen in a vacuum we can work out what the concentration of the hydrogen peroxide was and this method even with my shitty equipment is surprisingly repeatable and consistent except for one ginormous floor which took me ages to find out and well done if you've already spotted it because [ __ ] me it took me it took me far too long [ __ ] stare at this for a while yeah what's wrong with it we'll get to that soon okay we need a very clean container and this is important because we don't want any surfaces for the peroxide to react with and turn into oxygen around and also we want a nice smooth outside i guess and also we don't want to use plastic because we don't want organic contaminants in our peroxide so we're using our fancy teflon beaker here and then we're going to get some concentrated sulfuric acid and that's our next consideration we don't want the concentrated sulfuric acid to mix ever with the concentrated peroxide especially in this volume in a sealed container that will be very bad they are very reactive together a mix of concentrated sulfuric acid and 32 hydrogen peroxide is known as piranha solution due to its ability to be able to eat through organic materials it will turn material such as paper into carbon and then that carbon into carbon dioxide organic compounds such as sugar will very rapidly react with the piranha solution generating a lot of heat in quite a violent reaction don't want this in a scenario where we can knock over both those containers and they will mix that that's not a it's not a good scenario i think we broke the almond and finally we want a vessel they can both go into and for me i didn't really want something you could like screw shut or would seal really well because if the peroxide suddenly decided to turn into oxygen it's going to create a lot of gas and if it's a very well sealed container so i've got this vacuum vessel here which the lid just sort of seals against the metal by the vacuum pressure it doesn't screw on or isn't held on in any way so if the if the peroxide decides to turn all the way into oxygen for some reason it's just going to blow the lid off which will be bad but it won't shatter the metal or burst out somewhere which would be catastrophic we've got uh hydrogen peroxide we've got our desiccant and we've got our desiccator so let's run it let's put it in there for a week and come back and re-measure the concentration of the peroxide and after a whole week we've just gone up in concentration slightly i mean sure all right well i mean we'll just leave it another week and and come back and and it's gone up a little bit i guess it's not going up very fast 41 mils of gas it's uh i mean it's it's getting there no screw it it's way too slow we need something more aggressive we're going to bring out the big guns phosphorus pentoxide phosphorus pentoxide is a very good design because it reacts with water in the air to form phosphoric acid in an irreversible reaction the downside of phosphorus pentoxide is it's very expensive and hard to get for the amateur what's up with that i'm saying that like it's some relatable thing that other people have what's the deal with phosphorus pentoxide this does feel like a little bit of a waste using this 20 grams of phosphorus pentoxide [Music] but whatever we'll put it in there we'll run it for you know another week another two weeks and and it's increasing in concentration [Music] [ __ ] it who cares about time we're doing it we're actually doing it it's increasing in concentration and we've gone all the way to 102 102. we're now at the point where i've done things wrong he probably thought the mistake was in the maths but it's actually in the goddamn chemistry [ __ ] because i was using permanganate it doesn't react just to form water and oxygen you get a hydroxyl whatever boring [ __ ] but the point is you get twice as much oxygen per you know hydrogen peroxide so our starting peroxide wasn't 40 it was [ __ ] only 20 we spent all these god forsaken weeks concentrating it up to the point where it was starting with and i could just spend 20 dollars getting another bottle of peroxide already at 50 i was slightly annoyed at this but to be fair this reaction was burning through one of the things most valuable to me the thing money can't buy 40 grams of phosphorous pentoxide what's the deal it's so expensive however if we just calm down for a minute we have a method here that we know works so let's forget about time time's an illusion let's go and buy a new bottle of peroxide and instead of using permanganate we can just use a suspension of manganese dioxide to work out the gas volume and the equation works out correctly fresh bowler peroxide it's not fifty percent it's forty percent but it actually is 40 this time all we have to do is just go about concentrating it so let's just [ __ ] speed run this how hard can it be we just got to get new phosphorous pentoxide leave it for a week re-titrate it you know more sulfuric acid i even started running dry argon into the desiccator and doing like pump purge cycles to try and keep the desiccator dry and speed up the drying reaction more phosphorus pentoxide leave it for another week wait for it to stop raining more phosphorus pentoxide wait for it to stop hailing get the snake out of the house how how did you get inside the glassware can decide to break i can't repair that teflon that doesn't matter it's not slowing us down yeah whatever every week come in and titrate it okay i've used up my entire cylinder of argon now we're out of argon it's whatever just keep going the weeks go past and you've got more 4k footage than your computer knows how to store at 60 we can see that it generates a lot more heat and a lot more oxygen than the 40 that we've started with and above 70 we can see the peroxide starting to add to a fire act as an oxidizer and overcoming that dampening effect of all that water that holds it back at lower concentrations you can even see the peroxide solution itself take on a bit of a blue coloration at high concentrations and that's the absorbance of the peroxide in these very concentrated solutions we can finally start using my good vacuum pump actual decent vacuum on the desiccator i never went to very high vacuum because at higher vacuums the peroxide seems to degas really quickly which i i think would speed up its decomposition so i was always limited in the in the vacuum i could go i could be wrong about this i could be wrong about many things i don't know why it was taking so long the container might have been the wrong shape or the wrong size too big maybe too small maybe the seal wasn't very good and water just kept coming in maybe the vessels were too big or too tall or not wide enough there wasn't enough airflow maybe the container being metal ruined it i don't know i left it for such a long while and it finally got to 90 percent concentrated but there was only six grams of peroxide left but we've got there we have 90 percent peroxide made without vacuum distillation and it only took us one russian day one of the more interesting things i observed about the concentrated peroxide once it reached over about 60 you could see that its aqueous chemistry looked a bit less dramatic i think that's just because there is less water there to do the aqueous stuff like dissolving manganate to react with but also there's less water to turn into steam so it looks a lot less dramatic because it's just generating hot oxygen rather than steam but even a super concentrated piranha solution so if we do a piranha solution with 85 percent peroxide you'd expect it to to really really react very quickly but it actually doesn't react virtually at all unless you give it some sort of stimulation like you heat it here and then it does react i'm not sure what that cause of that delay is i don't know whether you need some sort of water to start the piranha solution reaction [Music] or something to do with the polarity and actually getting the compounds into the solution to be reacted with all of this aqueous chemistry limitations don't really apply to combustion though and this is where it really shines right because you can really start to use that hydrogen peroxide itself as an oxidizer in that fire [Music] so sure acts like an oxidizer we don't have a very much to spare which kind of sucks but hey we've we've done it i also have a lot of phosphoric acid now and do more what just concentrate it more right like go further in concentration i suppose so the freezing point of hydrogen peroxide and water mixtures changes depending on the ratio of those two in a shape that kind of looks like this and you can use this to your advantage to concentrate it right if you have very weak peroxide and you freeze it but only let half of it freeze the stuff that doesn't freeze will be more concentrated than the stuff that did freeze by a small percentage but it is a difference right so if you just collect that liquid and then do it again freeze it and then just collect the liquid again you'll be hopping down that curve right you can't get past that v point you can either go down or up the curve but you can't hop over the v does that make any sense i'm just not going to explain that bit just you just can't get over it all right fine so now we're on the 80 to 90 side of the v what we can do is freeze it a little bit collect the solid and throw away the liquid and the solid will be enriched in hydrogen peroxide so i try this at 85 percent and i'm using a calcium chloride solution that can get down to about negative 22 degrees in in the freezer and it should have frozen but it didn't and i was pretty confused by that i let it concentrate a little bit more so now we're at the 90 and once again we're trying to freeze it and it didn't freeze even though it's 90 it should have frozen i even have some dry ice to make the temperature go down and even at minus 30 degrees celsius it's not freezing but we've got dry ice so we can we can go even colder if you make a dry ice an ethanol solution we can get down to negative 70 and it doesn't matter the concentration of the peroxide here negative 70 degrees celsius should be able to freeze any concentration peroxide yet we see it doesn't freeze and this once again very confused me until i realized what was probably happening was it was super cooling because what we have here is a very pure solution right because not only have we tried to keep it very dust free any little bits of dust that have fallen into the solution would just get completely annihilated by the peroxide so there's nothing for the peroxide to crystallize around so this point i started getting a little aggressive with the peroxide which is not something you ever want to say throwing it around and just encouraging it to [ __ ] crystallize eventually it does and we have crystals of hydrogen peroxide once it has frozen we can take that solid mass out and put it in a higher temperature bath one that will let half of it melt but keep the other half solid and we can remove the melted bit and just leave behind the crystals which would be enriched in peroxide and we can do this a couple times until we reach basically a solution of nearly pure peroxide [Music] once again i wish i had more but then again you've got to be careful what you wish for because this is more than 95 concentrated peroxide and it's not something you want a lot of because it can just blow up [Music] [Music] i mean that's as far as we can go we basically made nearly anhydrous peroxide right like at this point the peroxide can dissolve in dichloromethane to a reasonable extent right there's not much water in the system and we can have a peroxide in dichloromethane oxidizer which is pretty scary yeah it's it's basically anhydrous i mean what more what more can we do better than that right we've just gone to sixth add more peroxide or whatever i mean could we peroxide the peroxide now we're going to make a molecule called hydrogen trioxide which looks like this and is an abomination we once again require the assistance of a device i call the hell machine to create this it's my ozone generator and for some reason it's got this tag on it and i can't remember what was going on with it last time i used it oh lord oh yeah i never repaired that i should probably repair that ah whatever it's nothing but a load-bearing solder can't fix all right so what this machine is doing is it's taking oxygen from my oxygen cylinder putting it through high voltage turning it into ozone and then we're running that ozone into concentrated hydrogen peroxide of around 90 [Music] and yes it's going to be at extremely low efficiencies but the ozone through the concentrated peroxide is going to make a whole host of molecules not only the hydrogen trioxide but also this abomination the h o o o minus ion which is ridiculous but apparently does exist i don't know any way that we could prove that we've made it here in solution i was really hoping we'd generate something that was impact sensitive at the end of this and i'd be able to set it off with a hammer but uh that's not the case which was a little bit disappointing sometimes you get so caught up in avoiding bad scenarios and surviving a procedure but you don't actually stop to think what is a good scenario actually speaking of surviving the procedure why am i doing this inside what the [ __ ] why would i do this inside think tom what the [ __ ] ozone smells like a lethal radiation dose feels that's something we can all relate to you know when you get a lethal radiation dose you taste the metal so that's more than 100 concentrated peroxide i've spent so much of my time not achieving my goals that when i do achieve the goals i didn't know what to do then everything decomposed like within a day so what is there left to do in fact i know what we have to do [Music] wait how do baseball people do things [Music] is [Music] [Music] are you taking runs you can't do that okay so now we're just not playing baseball this is baseball oh that's you're not bad i could be a baseball pro [Music]

Channel: Explosions&Fire

Views: 1,764,356

Keywords: home chemistry, science

Id: LhEYaovWxl4

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021