Is It Possible to Melt Wood in a Vacuum Chamber? The Wood Distillation Experiment

hey everyone today we're going to be seeing if you can melt wood and I'd like to thank the online video learning service the great courses plus for sponsoring this video I'll tell you a little bit more about them at the end of my video so every single substance in the world actually does have a melting point the only problem is most substances melting point is far above the temperature at which something spontaneously combusts and that happens to be the case with wood so wood has cellulose and lignin in it and a lot of other materials and all of those materials are really big molecules and really big molecules usually have higher melting points okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this wood in my vacuum chamber and then I'm going to shine my super bright laser on it to get it over its auto ignition temperature and see if it actually melts so I've actually had a lot of requests to do this a lot of people asking if you heat up wood in a vacuum would it actually melt so let me know in the comments section what your predictions are do you think the wood will actually melt when there's no oxygen around it okay attempting to melt wood in a vacuum three two one [Music] okay or 0.6 atmospheres and hoppin out my sphere in there now almost our full vacuum with this pump okay let's see if we can melt it three two one well that's cool you can see the smoke just falling off of it it's not floating so it looks like it's just becoming charcoal like and see the smoke just falling off of it so let me try to get the very corner if it really is melting we should be able to see something there okay let's let the air back in and see if we see any indication that it actually melted 3 2 1 okay so it mostly charred but look around the edges here there's an oily substance around it so this brown oily stuff around is something called pyro linnaeus acid and then the very dark stuff that you see is tar in fact you don't need a vacuum chamber to collect this tar or all of those other products so it's gonna be burning but the initial oxygen will get used up so there's no more oxygen left so from then on there's not going to be any burning but what's actually going to be happening is it's going to be PI realizing and that means the big huge cellulose and lignin molecules are going to start breaking down into smaller molecules and we're going to be capturing those chemicals in this jar here they'll have this jar in water it's going to be condensing all the smoke that comes off of this okay let's put our wood in okay you can see it starting to smoke in there okay let's try a little bit more wood with a shorter tube so you can see a lot of liquids forming at the top right there so that right there is the broken down cellulose and lignin so you can see the liquid components coming off of the wood here but what you don't see is the gaseous components so there's hydrogen carbon monoxide methane even co2 coming off of this and these are the gases that are actually burning when you see wood burning if you've ever looked at wood burning really close you'll notice that the flame isn't actually on the wood but it's above the wood that's because what's actually happening is you're heating the wood up high enough so that it breaks down into these gaseous components and those gases are what catch on fire on top of the wood there is a type of combustion that actually does happen on the surface and that's called smouldering so smouldering is when the oxygen directly reacts with the surface of the material so that's why if you've ever looked at a fire closely you kind of see two things happening you see some bright red coals burning and then you see fire above it so the fire above it is burning the gases coming from the material and the smouldering is actually burning the surface of the material so all the liquid that collected in my tube and everything was liquid that condensed at a higher temperature but in my glass here here's the lower temperature flammable fluid and this has a very this has a very strong smell to it so this right here is as close as you're gonna get to liquid wood this literally is the wood but it's not melted wood per se it's basically broken down wood that wasn't burned so basically what this means is that no matter what you do you cannot melt wood the reason is because in oxygen it just starts on fire in non oxygen environment it breaks down on its own and so when molecules get too big and too long you have to provide so much heat to melt them that they just break down spontaneously into smaller molecules that's the same reason why you can't melt rubber so rubber is such a big molecule in fact it's actually just one big mall kyoool so once rubber has been vulcanized its one big solid molecule so as you can imagine there's no melting point of rubber but what happens instead when you lie down fire is that it looks like it melts but what's really happening is just you're breaking down the huge components of vulcanized rubber into smaller molecules just like we did with the wood there again a big thank you to the great courses plus for sponsoring this video at this time they're giving everybody a free trial to their streaming service so head over to the great courses plus comm slash the action lab for your free trial today so the great courses plus is a subscription on-demand video learning service with top notch lectures and courses from top professors from the Ivy League and other great universities and especially experts from places like the National Geographic the Smithsonian and even the Culinary Institute of America for example our video here was on combustion if you want to learn about combustion just go to this lecture from this lecture I even learned about the history of the biggest non-nuclear explosion that's ever happened but you can also learn some other cool things like chemical reactions and everything so you will get unlimited access to a huge library of over 10,000 video lectures 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Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 5,410,343

Keywords: wood, melt wood, can you melt wood, liquid wood, fire, hydraulic press channel, life hacks, science experiments, can wood melt, the action lab, action lab, vacuum chamber, iron man, hydraulic press, brightest flashlight, blackest black, venus fly trap, stretch armstrong, foil ball, aluminum foil ball, negative mass, black 2.0, quantum mechanics, neodymium magnet, iron man suit, how to, science experiment, 32000 lumen, oobleck pool, gold foil ball, black

Id: eGemlz7krlk

Length: 7min 50sec (470 seconds)

Published: Wed May 16 2018