Making a Mysterious Foam

there's a pretty cool video that's been floating around for a while called the explosive polymerization of P nitro aniline a small amount of peanuts or aniline is mixed with sulfuric acid and heated over a Bunsen burner then after a short period of time a large snake suddenly appears I've actually already tried doing this in the past and it was one of the first videos that I ever made however my results were a little less impressive it was honestly really quite sad in comparison and because of this I've decided to try it out again I'm gonna be remaking the peanuts or Adaline but this time I'm gonna set up the demo a little differently and see if I get some better results on a side note not all of the peanuts are annalen that I make here is going to be used in this video I'm gonna be saving some to make a dye called para red which can be used to dye cotton and other cellulose based fabrics so to make the peanuts rattling this is everything that I'm gonna need the hydrochloric acid the acetic acid and sodium hydroxide were purchased from the store but the sulfuric acid the nitric acid and the acid tantalite were all made in previous videos if you're interested in seeing how I did this I've put some links in the description so to start things off I dumped the asset analyte into a beaker and I pour in some acetic acid then on top of this I drop in a magnetic stir bar a small amount of the asset analyte dissolves but most of it doesn't so I'm gonna have to heat things up a little I put everything into some hot water I turn on the magnetic stirring and I just wait I had to replenish the hot water a couple times but after five or ten minutes everything dissolves I take away the hot water and I slowly add some ice-cold sulfuric acid it's important to use cold sulfuric acid and to add it slowly here because it's addition generates a lot of heat anyway when I'm done adding the acid I set up an ice bath and I wait for it to cool to between zero and five degrees Celsius this is gonna take a little bit of time though so while I'm waiting I prepare my nitration solution to another beaker in an ice bath I add some nitric acid and I wait for it to cool when it gets to around 0c I start to add ice-cold sulfuric acid just like before adding the sulfuric acid produces a lot of heat so it's really important to do this slowly I was a little bit impatient so it heated up more than it should have and you can see acid vapours coming off if this happens it isn't a big problem but you really don't want to breed this in any way I cover the top with a watch glass and then I just wait for things to cool it eventually cools down to around 0c so I'm ready to get the reaction going all of the nitration mixture needs to be added to this solution but it has to be done slowly and with strong stirring ideally I would have just used magnetic stirring but as the solution cooled it thickened up and it's having a hard time anything that I add will just sit at the top so I also need to manually mix things on a side note what's kind of interesting is the refractive index of my solution here is very close to that of the stir rod so because of this it kind of disappears and it made mixing things a little bit weird anyway this part is pretty slow because I need to add about a hundred milliliters but only a few drops at a time as its added the temperature rises and it's really important to never let it go above 20 see what was kind of tricky was that the temperature increase wasn't always immediate so I needed to be really patient and to make sure that the temperature was decreasing before adding more adding it too quickly could cause a temperature spike which would lead to side products that we really don't want anyway the reaction I'm doing here is a pretty simple nitration in the presence of the nitric and sulfuric acid mixture the asset analyte is nitrated to form both ortho and para nitro asset analyte the para isomer is the one I want and the ortho one is just an unavoidable side product so for this reaction the major reason why we're keeping it at a lower temperature is to prevent multiple nitration x' below 20 C we mostly just get the mono nitration but if I were to do the reaction at let's say around 50 C I would get a lot of dye and probably try a nitrated products anyway I'm eventually done adding everything so I take it out of the ice bath and I let it sit for about thirty minutes as it sits here it slowly warms up to room temperature and the reaction goes to completion it's important to not let it sit here too long though otherwise it might start to get die and try nitrated so about a half hour later I take it off the stir plate and I dump it into some ice water it's important that the water here is freezing cold and packed with ice because the addition of the acid is going to heat things up quite a bit the products that I made in the reaction both the ortho and the para nitro asset analyte are not very soluble in water so they quickly precipitate out I go ahead and dump the rest in and I give the beaker a good washing to make sure that I transfer everything I stirred around a bit to mix it as well as possible and then I move on to filtering I'm not exactly sure why but by the time I went to go and add it it had become quite yellow this really isn't an issue though anyway even after pulling away most of the liquid the stuff that I have here is still full of acid so I need to wash it a few times with some ice-cold water after the washings I keep the vacuum on for a couple minutes to just try to dry it up as much as possible I transfer everything to a large beaker and then I dump in some dilute hydrochloric acid I mix things around to try to break up any large chunks and I turn on the hot plate on top of the beaker I place a round bottom flask that's filled with ice which should recondense any vapors that come off the stir bar from the first part of the reaction was never separated from the pea nitro a Satana lied so it was transferred over and it's still in this beaker so I turn on the stirring hoping that it would be enough to mix things but it really wasn't what I ended up needing to do was just occasionally taking off the round bottom flask mixing things around with a glass rod and then putting the flask back on eventually it got to a point where it liquefied enough that the stir bar is able to work so what I'm doing here is a hydrolysis reaction where the pea nitro a satellite is being converted to P nitro aniline with acetic acid as a side product the P nitro addling that forms has a free aiming group in it which is basic so it reacts with the hydrochloric acid this produces a salt compound simply called P mature aniline hydrochloride which is soluble in water so as the reaction progresses more and more of our products should dissolve into solution until it's eventually all gone anyway eventually everything disappears I continue heating things at just below the boiling point for about 15 minutes to just really make sure that the reaction is done fifteen minutes later it looked pretty good but there were still some solid things floating around and I'll need to get rid of them to do this it's really simple and I just need to do another quick filtration on top of this I also passed through a whole bunch of water to dilute the solution that we have here this dilution step is necessary for the procedure but it's also useful to wash out the beaker as well as the filter then I prepare a mixture of ice and water and I dump everything in I give everything a good mix and then I check the pH and as expected it's really acidic as I mentioned before what we have in these acidic conditions is P nitro aniline hydrochloride but we want the freebase version so to free it up I need to neutralize all the acid and make this mixture basic I whip up a really strong solution of sodium hydroxide and I just keep dumping it in and checking the pH eventually all the acid is gone and the solution is pretty strongly basic so at this point I'm done after adding all the sodium hydroxide though this mixture is pretty hot so before I filter things off I need to cool it down the peanut Roane alene is somewhat soluble in hot water so by cooling it down we're precipitating as much as possible it's also possible to cool it using a fridge or a freezer but I was pretty impatient so I just dumped ice in it once it was nice and cold I filtered everything off I washed it a few times with cold water and then I left the vacuum on to try to dry it up unfortunately I'm not quite done yet and I still need to separate my Parana TRO Adaline from the ortho side product to do this I'll need to do a recrystallization I dissolve everything in a minimal amount of boiling hot ethanol and then I let it slowly cool when it does the less soluble para nature ana lien will crystallize out but the ortho nature Adaline which is more soluble should stay dissolved once it got down to a round room temperature I place it in the freezer to make sure it crystallize as much as possible all the crystals were filtered off washed with some ice-cold ethanol and then allowed to dry so this is the final product after drying for a day or so my camera is a little bit weird with its yellows oranges and reds so it looks a lot more orange here than it actually is in any case though it's time to test it out I kept about five grams of it to make my parrot but the rest of it is going to be used for the demo the basic idea is to mix concentrated sulfuric acid with the P nitro aniline and to heat it up the major problem from the beginning though was I didn't know exactly how much of each ingredient to use so I kind of had to experiment a little also I don't have a wire gauze to even out the heating so I'm gonna have to be a lot more careful with the flame so for my first run I add a few grams of P nitro aniline to a measuring spoon and then I turn on the Bunsen burner on top of this I quickly pour in two milliliters of sulfuric acid and I give things a good mix now I just wait for the P nitro Adaline to melt and react with the sulfuric acid the exact details of this reaction aren't really known but I did find a resource online that explains most of it the first phase of the reaction is the pre expansion stage which occurs below about 230 C during this time the sulfuric acid attacks the peanut ro Adaline and does two major reactions dehydration and sulphonation we also get some deamination going on and it starts to polymerize forming this black tar the second phase of this reaction occurs above 230 C during this stage sulphur dioxide gas and water vapors are produced extremely quickly which causes things to erupt and puff up the final stink that forms is a really complicated polymer Network mixed in with carbon anyway the effect that I got from this run was not at all what I expected but it was still pretty cool it turned out like this because my measuring spoon wasn't big enough so things kind of spilled out before the major part of the reaction took place this is something cool that I noticed only now that I'm editing things if I slow it down and go frame by frame you can see that the liquid that spills over the side actually freezes and puffs up in midair the stuff that I'm left with is not very strong and it has a soft sponge like texture it's also really light because it's mostly just gases anyway I tried to do it again in the measuring spoon but it all spilled out so clearly I have to use something bigger I tried it in one of my Nile red 50ml beakers and it almost worked but it tipped over so at this point it wasn't working super well and I wanted to see what would happen if I used less sulfuric acid the first thing to notice is that as it's heated up a lot of yellow smoke comes off which is just vaporized P nitro aniline this time it was a lot more violent and it launched a bunch of it into the air there was still some left in the beaker though and to me it looked like a really dead and miserable cactus this think that's produced here is also a lot more brittle and fragile I went ahead and ran it again but this time I used less heat this slowed down the reaction a lot and it was barely able to make it out of the beaker I decided to try it again using less heat except with the measuring spoon to see if it would make a difference however pretty much as expected because the heating was so low I really didn't get a very violent reaction also I think because I was using less sulfuric acid there was a lot of unreacted peanuts or aniline left over which was able to catch on fire okay so using less sulfuric acid seems to be generally a bad idea so I decided to try it in the other direction and use a little bit more unfortunately this was the last bit of P nitro aniline that I had so I was really hoping it would work out the effect that I got here was pretty cool but it still wasn't what I was looking for so I was honestly a little bit sad from a bunch of the runs I saved the snakes to show you guys what the textures were like as I mentioned before when I used less sulfuric acid the stuff I produced was really brittle which is what you see here I had to be very careful and if I squeezed too hard when I picked it up it just crumbled this stuff is when I used more sulfuric acid and it has a much more spongy texture it feels so much stronger when I hold it and I'm not worried about it just crumbling between my fingers this is the snake from the first run that I did and because I did it in an open container the texture is really different anyway because it's pretty much just gases it's kind of like styrofoam there's not actually much solid material there with very little force I can easily squish it into a pancake one cool thing about this is that whatever polymer this is it's quite resistant to fire also because most of its volume is gas it's a good insulator and blocks the heat pretty well at some point NASA studied this material as a potential insulator for spacecraft but it never ended up being used I was honestly impressed that I was able to blast it with a blowtorch for such a long time without damaging the paper underneath also I can blast it for several seconds until it's red-hot and then pretty much immediately touch it and it's not that much hotter than room temperature anyway I guess that's about it in general I was pretty happy with how this project turned out but I was still a little bit sad that I wasn't able to recreate that effect it kind of just seems like a crapshoot because even under the same conditions the reaction never seems to turn out the same way on top of this there's a lot of variables to control like the amount of sulfuric acid to use the amount of heating or the container to do it in what I've decided is that I'm committed to absolutely recreating this effect so I'm gonna buy a whole bunch of peanuts or aniline and I'm just gonna keep doing runs until I get it to work I'll try it a whole bunch of different ways using different amounts of sulfuric acid different heating techniques and various containers I'm also thinking of making a whole event out of it and maybe live-streaming it I have no idea of when exactly I would do this though but I'll make sure to tell all of you guys so you won't miss it a big thanks goes out to all of my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me will see my videos 24 hours before I post it to YouTube and they can also directly message me anyone who supports me with five dollars or more will also get their name at the end like you see here [Music]

Channel: NileRed

Views: 1,110,729

Rating: 4.9358354 out of 5

Keywords: nile, red, chemistry, explosive, polymerization, p-nitroaniline, science, sulfuric, acid, fire, resistant, foam, polymer, plasticraincoat1, organic, nilered

Id: rxLNIHM0BZ0

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/gsurfer04]

I don't know why he's so disappointed. He achieved much greater than that piddly tower in the old video.

[u/pakachiku]

He generally tends to be hard on himself.

[u/dasKonzentrat]

Does anybody know more specifics about the reaction?