Pouring Molten salt into Water - Explosion!

when you mix salt into water you normally get a very safe product like salt water but under special conditions mixing the two together can result in a massive explosion so today that's exactly what we're gonna try to do so I first saw this video a couple months ago posted by the channel what we made and the guy just took some molten salt and poured it into the water it started excludable flattering all over the I couldn't figure out why it was happening was it a chemical reaction or a physical reaction I couldn't figure it out but what I do know is I had to try it for myself so with the help of a high-speed camera we should be able to tell exactly what's going on so I'm going to be using this Morton kosher salt but I'm pretty sure that any table salt will work and yes you actually can melt table salt it has a melting point of one thousand four hundred seventy four degrees Fahrenheit or 801 degrees Celsius when it's molten it's very water like an fluid but it quickly hardens into a massive crystals and it makes it cool noise when it cools down [Music] this is a small stainless steel shot glass crucible I found at the thrift store and it holds about 50 grams okay exactly 50 grams of sodium chloride next I put it into my furnace turn on the propane and just blast it until it melts this takes about ten minutes and you can tell when it's melted because the bright yellow sodium flames coming out the top well let's put into my hi-tech pouring device and see what happens that wasn't too bad we survived well I was expecting an explosion and that hardly splattered at all I'll try this again all right now I'm getting pretty disappointed I thought this would explode so I heated it up really hot and I said I'm going to pour it in as fast as I can this explosion was totally awesome and a total surprise I was expecting a little bit of splattering but what I got was like a full-on powerful explosion look at the cavitation bubbles on the glass and it just shattered it and blew that fishtank glass across my yard I still don't know what's going on and I think we should try again plus an experiment has to be repeatable to be valid that last shot was awesome but I think it was a little bit overexposed so I put a zoom lens on it and I cranked down the exposure so it'll be darker and maybe we can see better what's going on if there's one goes boom we gotta protect my little dog ears too three-two-one even at 7,000 frames per second the explosion is nearly instantaneous you can see just a small amount of sodium chloride salt could create this huge gas bubble and you might think it's over there's more little explosions happening on the inside surface of this gas bubble and just when I think it's done boom you know that actually looks pretty peaceful I mean pretty peaceful for a cloud filled with molten salt expanding at several thousand feet per second that's trying to kill you still looks pretty nice a close-up view was really interesting now I wanted to see what a wide-angle shot would look like [Music] what it's really interesting to see the force of this explosion the glass on the fishtank flexes back and forth and the whole thing jumps up an inch into the air probably displaced about two gallons of water out of a fish tank this did end up breaking my fish tank but not really it just separated the glass from each other without breaking it [Music] now we're bumping it up to 21,000 frames per second a little bit smaller resolution but you gotta try [Music] all right so we got a new fish tank and we're ready to try some other salts the first one we're going to try is 4s it's like a laundry detergent booster and it also has used as a flux in like casting put it on top to keep the oxygen away and it contains sodium tetraborate so it's an ionic compound and we'll see if this one explodes too [Music] I'll make these next few clips quick because nothing really crazy happened to them I poured borax sodium carbonate and boric acid into the fish tanks they were protected by the Legion frost effect the whole time so they were never able to contact the water directly which means they never exploded but it's kind of interesting why salt explodes but not the other ionic liquids even with the higher melting point all right so if this is chemical I think I have a way to test it out so some of you guys might think that it's the sodium and a sodium chloride that's reacting with the water so I've gone ahead and I've chopped up like five grams of sodium metal and what we're gonna do is melt it and pour it into the fish tank so if it's a chemical reaction we should see the same style and speed of explosion that we've been seing so far I think this is a stupidest thing I've ever done [Music] well that was pretty interesting and scary let's check the high-speed sodium metal reacts pretty violently when poured into water as expected but is it in silent as a molten salt explosion so I'm gonna do is take the two clips put them side-by-side and see exactly are these windows between molten sodium and molten salt there's a clear winner and that is molten salt I think the problem is this sodium can't get under the water fast enough so it explodes right on the surface okay I think I've got this figured out I'm 99% sure this is not a chemical reaction but I think I can prove it I filled up a small stainless steel container with pH neutral water I tested it for acids and bases before and there was no change next I poured in some of the molten salt if this was a chemical reaction and the sodium was reacting with the water or the chlorine was drafting with the water we would see either an indication of pH gain or pH loss so I did that I poured it in I tested it and there was no pH change the water was still dutiful okay so I think this is a purely physical reaction and let me show you what I think is going on say this piece of putty is a soap as a piece of sodium fluoride falling through the water okay so when it's falling through the water I think a piece of water a drop of water I don't know gets caught inside of the glob of the sodium chloride and when that happens that water's gonna get super hot and it's gonna turn into steam so that's gonna expand until about 1,600 times its size in a fraction of a second and then all this is going to react with more water and more water and more water because it's getting blasted out from the initial one and suddenly you've got this big thing and there's sodium chloride going everywhere and the whole thing just explodes it's an exponential function which means it's an explosion as it's still a mystery why the lead and frost effect breaks down for sodium chloride and not for the other salts I poured in the water that's still unexplained I can't explain it maybe one of you guys will have a better idea finally I would like to thank Nathan at aimed research for letting me borrow this high-speed camera I've got tons of cool stuff to do with it now Nathan rents high speed cameras and they're an extremely affordable price so check out the website the links down in the description but don't rent a yeah because I'm still using it all right see you next time guys I hope you enjoyed this video bye [Music]

Channel: TheBackyardScientist

Views: 39,290,795

Rating: 4.8448901 out of 5

Keywords: null

Id: PDRWQUUUCF0

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/LordBiscuits]

And now he's never going to be able to walk in that yard bare foot again.

[u/Chabranigdo]

I love this guy. He's basically the poster child of r/HoldMyBeaker.

[u/Solastor]

Hurr dee durr let's put on our goggles and gloves for safety...then wear fucking shorts.

[u/stevenette]

Isn't it just surface area? With the other effect, there is no expansion.

[u/jeaserstrife]

It’s the backyard scientist

u/merlinthewhite

[u/clydefrog811]

This guy is a dumbass and is a horrible example to kids.

[u/paleo2002]

Shorts, short sleeves, hair's in his face . . . are those swimming goggles? This kid's a PPE nightmare. If I let him in my lab class dressed like this, I'd get in trouble. And all we do is look at rocks!

[u/WatchHim]

The technical name for this is a BLEVE