Hey, what's up guys? I am back in the kitchen today, wearing my lab jacket
And you know what that means we are about to do something extremely dangerous
I have over here some very very concentrated bottles of sulfuric and nitric
Acids these things are extremely extremely dangerous substances and can cause some bodly infections.
I also have some baking soda some cotton balls and some tampons you'll see what those are for later
Now for this experiment today, I thought it might be fun to try making nitro Cotton or gun Cotton, flash cotton
Whatever you want to call it goes by a lot of different names now
Whatever you want to call this stuff the process of making
It isn't very difficult at all very very dangerous, but not difficult let me show it
Now to make this experiment a little more scientific. We are going to be measuring our results
I have a little scientific beaker here so we can measure out equal portions of sulfuric and nitric
Acid then we're going to dip them in one by one letting them each soak in the solution for about five minutes
take them out rinse them let them dry and measure the results now the sulfuric acid
I'm using is 93% sulfuric acid I got this stuff from a chemical supply store
And I'm using it just for convenience
We could use the sulfuric acid I extracted from my car battery in a previous video but for this experiment here
I want the results to be as pure as we can get them
We're also using 70% nitric acid which we could make
Ourselves however the time and effort that would need to go into producing it is beyond the scope of our experiment today
Now my beaker measures up to 120 milliliters
And I want to do a 50/50 ratio of Sulfuric and nitric
acid so let's start off filling our beaker with 60 milliliters of nitric acid first then followed up with 60 milliliters of Sulfuric acid to top it off
Now because we're dealing with some pretty dangerous chemicals here
I have a bag of ice and some baking soda the idea being that we can fill up a bowl with ice water so if
We have a thermal runaway we have a place to dump it and mix with baking soda
So we have a solution that will help neutralize any acid if we have any accidental spills
Okay, so our nitric and sulfuric acids have been mixed and it's very important to know that when these two liquids mix together they heat
up very fast
using an infrared thermometer
We can see this liquid goes from about 68 degrees Fahrenheit up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few seconds
That's the difference of around 20 degrees Celsius to 50 degrees Celsius for International viewers
And that is one of the reasons we have our bath of ice standing by oh and by the way the fumes are toxic
Now this is actually still quite warm, and we need it to cool back down to room temperature
So while we're waiting let's weigh out our cotton balls
now, I'm not exactly sure how much cotton our
120 milliliters solution of Acid can handle so I'm going to weigh out and track eight different cotton balls so we can measure their success
after they've been nitrated so we can find the point where the nitration starts dropping off. Here goes Cotton ball number one and
It looks like we are at 0.55 grams Cotton ball number two
zero point six zero number five
Now the beginning of this video. I told you we might be doing something with tampons as well
And here's what I'm thinking if we open up one of these applicator packages and take a look inside
You can see that tampon is mostly just made of cotton
So if we stripped away the outer membrane and dip just the cotton tampon into our solution
Do you think are we possible to get a tampon to work as well flash Tampax that doesn't really serve any useful purpose
it's just for fun
to 2.40
So our solution is cooled down to about 85 degrees Fahrenheit
That's good enough for me
So let's go ahead and take cotton ball number one and use a glass stir stick to hold it in solution
so it can nitrate for about five minutes now the cotton is nitrating theoretically the temperature should be rising again as well
You can see we're already up to 88 Fahrenheit now while our Cotton ball is soaking here
Let me tell you a little bit about what's taking place
The fibers of the Cotton Ball themselves are reacting with the nitric acid to nitrate the Cotton which also releases moisture into the solution
Now moisture isn't really good for this reaction
So the sulfuric acid which is a dehydrating agent absorbs that moisture and keeps the reaction relatively clean
depending on how much cotton we have in the solution the reaction can get very very hot which is why we're measuring the temperature and
We have a bath of ice water we can dump it to if we need to all right good news
It's been five minutes. So our time is up with Cotton ball number one
So we're just going to fish that off and we're going [to] squeeze it to leave as much of the liquid as we can in
The container we're going to transfer it to a glass of fresh water and let it soak
You can see that as we dab the cotton ball into the water at least it's quite a bit of the acid that has stored
And we need to do this four to seven times to thoroughly rinse out as much acid as we can possibly get
see if there's any fizzing
There's a little bit of acid on there the baking soda helps neutralize any of the leftover acid in the cotton
Now we simply repeat that process over and over again until all eight Cotton balls are finished
Update guys all eight [of] our cotton balls are finished. They have been fully nitrated
They've been washed rinsed cleansed and put on this plate to sit overnight to dry
Unfortunately while they're still wet we don't have any way to test them, but in tomorrow's video
We're going to light them [up] and see how they perform
And what's going to happen with this thing could it be that we've just invented the world's first
Pyrotechnic Tampon and very curious to find out so in the meantime. Let's take just a second to briefly recap
What we did here [today]?
And what we're trying to accomplish
We start off our experiment with sulfuric and nitric acid and the intent to mix them together in a 50/50 ratio
But going back and looking at it
I think I messed up things being from this angle and added 80 milliliters of nitric acid and 60 milliliters of Sulfuric acid
But I think it's still going to work out next we weighed and documented each of our cotton balls
And then soaked them one by one in the solution for five minutes after soaking for five minutes
We squeezed all the acid out of them rinse them four different times and then put them in a solution of [baking] Soda to neutralize
Any leftover acid after that they were rinsed one more time?
And then all the water was squeezed out then they were placed on this plate where they could sit overnight to dry
So here's the question. I want to figure out tomorrow
How much cotton does it take to use up all the nitric acid in our solution tomorrow?
We're going to play with these cotton balls to see if they go off with a flash and we're going to burn through each of
Them to see where the nitration point started to drop off how many of these cotton balls?
Do you think we're successfully transferred in the flash cotton leave your thoughts in the comments below?
Well, that's it for today. All we can do now is wait. Thanks for joining it for this video
I'll be looking for you the next one. Talk to [you] then
whoa ha ha ha...
That's cool. Sweet that was a little more vigorous [than] I was expecting
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