Punching a Hole Through Solid Steel Frozen With Liquid Nitrogen

hey everyone today i'm going to be seeing if i freeze a solid steel plate with liquid nitrogen can i actually punch a hole through it so we've all seen movies before where somebody freezes a safe or a gel cell or something with liquid nitrogen or something really cold and they can usually break the bars or punch a hole through the metal wall well i wanted to test if that's really the case and then i'll be talking about what cold temperatures actually does to steel does it actually make it weaker or stronger okay so i have some liquid nitrogen here first let's test what happens when i hit an iron screw with this so this is some iron alloy screw with a zinc coating on it so first to test this i'm going to take two screws i'm going to hit one that's at room temperature and one that's a liquid nitrogen temperatures and see if there's a difference in the brittleness so let's put our screw in the liquid nitrogen okay first let's hit this one i just broke my cement but not the screw now let's grab the liquid nitrogen screw hit it the head popped off somewhere so that easily broke okay so you could easily see there was a difference between the two screws the one that was at room temperature and the one that was at liquid nitrogen temperature were definitely different i could easily break the colder one but let's take it a step further and see what if i freeze an entire steel plate and i'd like to thank the sponsor for this video raid shadow legends everybody knows rage shadow legends by now but did you know it's their second anniversary one of my favorite things about this game is the awesome graphics in it and also the storyline of it so as i said this month is raid's second year anniversary and the schedule is going to be packed with amazing events they've got six straight weeks of anniversary events and tournaments and they're launching their first ever clan vs clan tournament to give players a chance to compete directly against another clan raid's a huge game already but their anniversary makes it an even better time to join now if you haven't yet so if you want to get a huge head start in raid all you have to do is hit the link in the description and you'll get your free epic champion joetin and you'll get a hundred thousand silver 50 gems and three ancient shards so you can summon ancient champions as soon as you get in the game all these treasures are waiting for you here once you're in you can find me in the game under the name at the action lab and if you're fast you can even join my clan and it's that easy just click the link in my description and i'll see you in the game or use this qr code that's been shown at the bottom of the screen and now let's get back to our experiment so you can see this has already been through a lot let's see if i can actually break through it with liquid nitrogen and the way we're going to see when this gets to liquid nitrogen temperatures is when we no longer see the lead in frost effect now the lead in frost effect is when we see little beads of liquid nitrogen rolling on top of it that's because compared to the liquid nitrogen the steel is so hot that it creates this pocket of gas below it but as soon as the temperatures get closer together then it's going to spread out on top of the steel so you can see in the middle here how it's not rolling around in these little spheres on the side see on the outside here it rolls around and bubbles but here it's sticking to it so once it starts sticking to it you know it's at liquid nitrogen temperatures right in the center so this is right where i'm going to punch it okay here we go got it okay one two nope not getting through that ow okay i should really have goggles on if you have a hammer yeah i'll do this part even with the hammer doesn't work nothing okay so that did not work i wasn't able to get through the steel with my fist or a hammer and same thing when i cool down some rebar to liquid nitrogen temperatures and strike it with a hammer i can't get it to really shatter now normally it seems natural to think of things breaking when we get them really cold because we've seen videos of whenever you freeze things like for example freezing this flower here and then hit it against a table it just shatters into a million pieces but the reason things like this shatter is because they have water in them and the water forms ice inside and then the ice can easily break but that same logic doesn't hold true for why does a metal break easier when you freeze it well the first thing you have to understand is that when you cool steel down it doesn't actually make it weaker but it actually makes it stronger so despite what your intuition might tell you even in the experiment where i hit the screw and it broke that screw wasn't actually weaker it was actually stronger than the one at room temperature now the thing that keeps the material strong is the ability to be slightly ductile meaning it can bend a little bit for example if i make a graph of the yield strength of 410 stainless steel you can see that as i start at 50 degrees celsius the yield strength is only down here but as i decrease the temperature to negative 200 degrees celsius the yield strength rises to here and so as i decrease the temperature the yield strength increases but the thing is when you have something that yields at a higher strength it usually means that it's more brittle so instead of yielding it just breaks so instead of bending it just breaks in a fracture so really high strength or hard things usually are pretty brittle for example if i just take a diamond here's a real diamond and hit it with a hammer it fractures into a bunch of pieces so the diamond is very hard but it's also brittle the same thing happens with glass glass is actually very strong and very hard but it fractures really easily so when you lower the strength of the still you're actually decreasing the toughness of it even though you're increasing the strength now the brittleness of the steel is completely dependent on the type of steel it depends on the alloy itself and it also depends on how that alloy was treated for example there's a test you can do that measures the hardness and you can measure its impact strength and if you take three different steels here's how the impact strength would look at different temperatures so you can see for some steels as you decrease the temperature it just drops down at some specific temperature and this transition here from high impact strength to low impact strength is called the ductile to brittle transition and you can see that for some low strength steels there's an abrupt transition but then for other low strength steels like this brown line here it's not as abrupt but for some high strength steels it's lower the impact strength is lower and then also there's not as an abrupt transition either so it completely depends on your steel alloy and it depends on your type of metal all together whether you're using steel or not in general if your metal is pretty ductile at room temperature it will probably still be a little ductile even at liquid nitrogen temperatures so that's why when i tried to break this aluminum bowl that was a liquid nitrogen temperatures it just bent didn't break or even this aluminum beam try aluminum doesn't break okay here's the frozen gallium frozen with liquid nitrogen let's see how brittle it is whoa so can liquid nitrogen be used to make metals more brittle well yes and no it depends on the specific type of metal that you're trying to break if it's something that's already ductile it probably won't work very well if it's a very specific type of steel alloy you could break it and thanks for watching another episode of the action lab i hope you enjoyed it if you did don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet and also hit the bell so that you can be notified when i release my latest video and thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 904,223

Keywords: liquid nitrogen, breaking metal, frozen metal, frozen steel, punch through, liquid nitrogen experiments, science experiments, the action lab, action lab

Id: 5G7IwrT1ZNs

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021