Why Liquid Oxygen & Carpet DON'T Mix

in today's video we've got a few fun experiments to see what happens when we burn things in liquid oxygen guys in a previous video you saw us try to burn diamonds and we succeeded and we had the help of Alexander Alexander is with us again he's our go-to science guy who also tells us like oh you'll blow the house up if you try that so he kind of keeps us in check while also encouraging us to do more fun stuff it's just the kind of influence we like to have around he tells us how to safely do dangerous things for those who may not remember you whatever what are you studying these days I'm studying metallurgical engineering and I'm almost done with my degree and then hopefully going to graduate school in in what was that the the nuclear engineering nuclear engineering or material science engineering so he knows a lot of things which is why we like to have him around and he's the one who sort of introduced us to this idea so we wanted to have him on the show to show us some of his favorite things to put in liquid oxygen let's get started here's the basic idea we've got liquid oxygen and we've got a few different things that should burn fairly well and we want to see if we can make them burn really well by immersing them in liquid oxygen so we've got oxygen flowing into this coil right now and pretty soon right then we're going to get a little stream of liquid oxygen coming out the other end so we're just going to wait for this cup to fill up and then we can do some fun experiments okay the first recipe we call for about a cup of liquid oxygen on the graham cracker here's one I prepared earlier so we've got this graham cracker very thoroughly marinated for lack of a better word in the liquid oxygen we're going to put it down on the concrete and then Nate would you do the bake at 3,000 yeah for five seconds I'm already thrilled in case you're curious that is not how normal gram crackers burn should we have a side-by-side for comparison we can roll eke out the heat that that puts off yeah oh yeah that's amazing I love it here's how normal Grande Packers burned big towns I mean it it burned as long as the torches it's probably possible to actually light it on fire I think that's a charge let's get our grams out all right here is one graham cracker I hear we have a marshmallow [Music] that's just how I like my s'mores I'm thrilled hmm oxygen [Music] so this is the control about half of this probably more like two-thirds of this cracker is soaked in liquid oxygen and the other third is not so you can see that that half is very rapidly burning and then probably when it gets to about that boundary it'll stop burning quite as vigorously there we go so you can see that once all of the liquid oxygen has burned away the cracker is significantly less flammable and behaves you know like a graham cracker I should also point out that the reason this is working so well is the reaction that we would commonly call burning is really just a disguised chemical reaction it's very high speed and high energy oxidation so when we add more oxygen it happens faster and when it happens faster it can go more completely and give us a lot more energy so obviously soaking graham crackers in liquid oxygen and lighting them off wasn't dangerous enough so let's try some sparklers it seems like a great idea all right so since we're not exactly sure what this is going to do what kind of reaction it's going to have when we put it in the liquid oxygen we want to make sure that we're being as safe as we can be within reason so since these have a little steel stem on them we just took a scrap piece of 2x4 and a magnet and if we stick it on the end you can see that we can kind of suspend this and then we can be as far away as this piece of wood allows us to be and still have the desired reaction so sparkler is burning let's just gently doesn't seem to make much difference to it honestly no it's not really happy much of an effect one way or the other it's just breaking the cup it's breaking the cup of it also it it tainted our liquid oxygen can you see that yeah it looks like am I crazy or was that longer do you see the little beads of molten metal there I think it actually melted the stick here was one that burned with out that wow we there we go so a significant amount of the little handle on it we've done this several times now well not this particularly thing but we've dropped lots of different things into the liquid oxygen in one of these cups this cup is just shattered to bits alright cotton burns everybody knows that this is a piece of cotton cloths so for a control test fire there you go so that's how a normal piece of cotton cloth would burn so your t-shirt that's how that would burn okay [Music] whoa there we go huh and then just all went up at once oh yeah very short high-intensity reaction yeah not a long lifespan there but really cool this time we're just going to get this burning we're gonna have liquid oxygen in the glass we're gonna get this burning and just drop it in [Music] and it's gone very nice it's just gone yeah oh there's nothing left [Music] okay so what we're going to do right now is very similar setup to what we did before with the sparkler steel wool also reacts very well with oxygen if you've ever put a 9-volt battery on it lit a small amount on fire and then blown on it you know that the more air you supply to it the faster it burns so our question is what's going to happen if we put it in an environment that is 100 percent oxygen so again since we're not exactly sure what this is going to do and we suspect it's going to be quite energetic we are going to take this and sensitives magnetic use our little magnet jig here and just pull it it'll fall into that bowl full of liquid oxygen after it's been lit on fire and hopefully we will get a very exciting result ready 3 2 1 goodbye bowl [Music] look at all of the little bits of molten member coalesced edible that bowl is given up [Music] [Music] all right so Alex what's the next plan well the next plan is we're going to scale it up a little bit so we've previously been doing just maybe a few tens of grams of this steel wool here and we're going to do two entire pads of it so according to my preliminary calculations this should release approximately the same amount of energy that's required to light a standard light bulb for 40 minutes and we're going to be doing that in a very short period of time so we're expecting this to be very energetic we're going to use the magnet rig but since it's a little bit windy out here we've modified it so instead we're just going to lower it in on a string but I'll still be back in safety and we should get some really nice footage of the reaction and this cup is ceramic non-star foam yeah so hopefully it will last for long enough for all of this deal to react we'll see [Laughter] oh there's a puddle of nice is it just liquid steel that's just steel that is so much better than I had hoped [Music] all right so one thing that I've always heard as kind of a danger of liquid oxygen is and this is true it makes everything extremely flammable one of the common anecdotes that they use is let's say you're pouring it in a room with carpet and a little bit spills on the floor and then there's a static shock the carpet might ignite and burn very rapidly I've never actually seen that done I believe that carpet will become extremely flammable with liquid oxygen but I actually have a little test square of carpet here that I would like to see if that anecdote is true so let's give it a try so after some careful consideration we've decided that since this is made of polyester it's probably going to have a much more energetic reaction even than all the other experiments we've done for that reason we are going to use the sparkler on the end of this PVC pole to ignite it and that way we will be a safe distance away from any explosions which may occur so I'm gonna light the sparkler and then I'm very quickly gonna start pouring liquid oxygen over the carpet square then I'll back a good ways away at which point Alexander will will prod the oxygen soaked carpet square with the sparkler and I'll be over here far [Music] all right three two one there's no carpet left this is against is the backing on the carpets which apparently is not made of the same material as the rest of the carpet wow that was that was amazing that was right as it turns out the anecdote is true if you pour liquid oxygen on carpet it becomes extremely extremely flammable I don't think that even classifies this flammable that might not even be explosive all right that was that was so cool a million thanks again to Alexander and to kuma films for those unbelievable slow-mo shots it looks so good guys cool films got some cool stuff go check out their channel they look beautiful guys thanks for watching click up there to check out our most recent video team rocket blasting off again

Channel: TKOR

Views: 2,139,122

Keywords: burning diamonds in liquid oxygen, liquid oxygen flammable, liquid oxygen on carpet, liquid oxygen, grant thompson, random happens, science experiments, how to make liquid oxygen, lox, mad science, explosions, chemical reaction, chemistry, graham cracker flammable, liquid oxygen fire, chemical reactions and equations, mind blowing science, liquid oxygen experiments, tkor, thekingofrandom, freeze, education, tests, frost, properties of oxygen, oxygen chemistry, solid oxygen

Id: 8Ab3hyDKsj0

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2019