What Happens if You Pour Liquid Nitrogen in Gasoline?

hi i'm internet science boy and i guess it's good enough thor kyle hill in my day-to-day life as a totally not a supervillain scientist i look up a lot of weird things on the internet like the tensile strength of human colon patents on baby launchers and military papers on nuclear weapons i'm probably on a watch list because of this i take my online privacy very seriously that's why today's episode is brought to you in part by surf shark surfshark is an award-winning vpn that secures your digital life with top-of-the-line servers that allow for an unlimited number of your devices to connect to the internet without revealing your true location hackers streaming services social media sites that are ruining democracy they can't control what you see and do if they don't know where you are because you're using surfsharkvpn to hide your true ip address as a guy with a facility you know i like that where even am i right now you'll never find out if you want to try surf shark like i am you can sign up at surfshark.deals kyle and tell them the boy sent you with the offer code kyle you'll get 83 off and three extra months for free you're welcome they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee additionally so there's no risk in trying and the tensile strength of the human colon is 4.21 psi by the way all right let's see what weirdness we're looking up in today's episode it's not butts stuff probably oh hey thanks for coming in uh yeah personal office is pretty sparse but you know what they say cluttered office cluttered mind i was doing some personal experimentation with my own personal brand of liquid nitrogen don't worry about it and i didn't even think i was going to show any of you the results i was just going to experiment with some different liquid substrates see what happens on camera yada yada but then i ended up filming maybe the prettiest science i've ever seen in my life check this out [Music] um uh yeah so today we're gonna dive deep into this phenomenon what's actually going on can we figure it out let's do some experimentation of our own and see if you and i can discover something new about what's going on together oh the office door is back that way [Music] now entering the facility what we just witnessed is the interaction between liquid nitrogen and gasoline now there are other videos of this interaction on the internet but none of them feature an actual explanation imagine that so today because this is so intricate unbelievably gorgeous to me we're gonna try our own analysis and we begin with the obvious that's the lead in frost effect the leading frost effect is usually the first thing you learn when you learn about liquid nitrogen it's what happens when an ultra low boiling point liquid interacts with anything that you would consider a livable temperature the boiling point of liquid nitrogen is negative 320 degrees fahrenheit so if it touches pretty much anything it's going to instantly boil this instantaneous boiling creates a barrier of vapor around the liquid around the droplets and this allows it to interact without really interacting for example if you pour liquid nitrogen on the ground it will skitter away like the ground is a hot skillet and it's also why don't try this at home you can pour yes that's my hand liquid nitrogen on your hand for just a moment and the leading frost effect will save you because your hand is so so much hotter than the liquid nitrogen now the lead and frost effect is definitely part of the phenomenon here but i don't think it's the only part it can't be because the overall effect here changes with different liquid substrates or the liquid underneath the liquid nitrogen so for example let's try to replicate what we saw with gasoline with water instead liquid nitrogen on water is still really really cool but do you notice now there isn't a dancing effect where drops are bouncing all around for an extended period of time instead it looks like the droplets are more or less staying in place and actually freezing the water surface this all gives us a hint that the freezing point of the liquid substrate could have a lot to do with our effect that we observe and it's true water and gasoline differ greatly across this variable water freezes at zero degrees celsius and gasoline at negative 40. but water is also significantly different across another property oh we're done oh meow indeed why does an open container of gasoline seem to fill an entire room with its smell so quickly while something like a soda does not i mean the gasoline is not a nerd at comic-con am i right well the answer is vapor pressure now when a liquid is at thermal equilibrium with its surrounding environment at the liquid surface randomly some particles will be energetic enough to escape the surface these escaped energetic particles will push on the surrounding air exerting a pressure vapor pressure which is dependent on the ambient temperature the pressure and the properties of the liquid itself now why gasoline seems to fill up an entire room so quickly as compared to something like water is because the vapor pressure is 27 times higher this is also why you need to be so careful when you're filling up your gas tank vapor gets everywhere very quickly like democracy destroying information on twitter another way to think about vapor pressure is the rate of evaporation from the surface but you should stop using twitter and facebook yeah i'll take the tuna with uh let's put some rye how do you keep getting in here anyway to test whether or not vapor pressure really has anything to do with our observed phenomenon we have to control for the variable of freezing point controlling for variables is one of the most important parts of science and experimentation because if you're changing something about your setup but you're not controlling for a variable keeping one variable consistent you will not be able to tell whether or not a new variable is doing anything when you change your setup so now instead of water we're going to be using vodka which i just happen to have a lot of and what's good about vodka is that it has a freezing point similar to gasoline it's not a perfect fit but it's close so now we're controlling for the freezing point variable but vodka has a vapor pressure similar to water because vodka at least the kind that i have a lot of is mostly water so if the gasoline vapor pressure is going to do anything we should be able to see some difference now between the water test and the vodka test so let's see what happens wow the vodka test might actually be my favorite but it still doesn't look like our original test does it so what is the explanation here well based on my experiments today i'd formulate some very sciency sounding speak that sounds something like this the interaction between a high vapor pressure low freezing point liquid and a liquid exhibiting the leading frost effect creates an enhanced vapor barrier allowing the random outgassing of droplets to provide thrust for near frictionless propulsion on the liquid substrate in other less fancy words what are we writing an abstract on plus one some of you get it the gasoline's super high vapor pressure plus the leading frost effect gives this a kind of air hockey table-like levitation for the boiling droplets and because the freezing point of gasoline is so low they don't freeze the surface and stay in place instead they just thrust around like tiny little rocket ships just according to geometry now is this an actual effect that we're describing today i can't be totally sure but i do think this is the first real attempt and an explanation for what you see going on today and all the other videos of this you see on the internet i'll take it i think i'm pretty close to what's physically going on here so with that i'll leave you with some more gorgeous footage until next time aria will you uh recalibrate the chain whip turrets please [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for the direct and substantial support in the creation of this year video today especially i want to recognize research assistant nathan carcamo and visiting scholar trent stallery if you want to join the facility if you want to get your lab coat get episodes early talk with me in discord give me episode ideas see behind the scenes photos and videos you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and get on the facility staff today and if you support us just enough you get your name on aria here each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pet there's probably one other part going on here so there's this beautiful almost ocean mist like vapor above all these liquid substrates and i think even it's the smallest part of the effect because uh the liquid nitrogen vapor it's so cold it stays low to the ground kind of like a fog machine so it stays on the top but there's probably also some cooling of the air immediately above and when you have something with a high vapor pressure and you cool it way down then you can get this condensation and you can get these trails of condensation and this is the exact same thing that we saw in our cloud chamber that we made when you cool down a very very high vapor pressure alcohol and you cool it way down and it forms vapor and so i think that's probably the last bit of what's going on i i mean if you want to name the effect after me i'm not going to stop you you know thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 291,202

Rating: 4.9597573 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, liquid nitrogen, gasoline, chemistry, science experiments, experiments, because science chernobyl

Id: PVAoxMqabr4

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020