[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] We've got a cool experiment coming to us from a YouTube comment
We've got a cool experiment coming to us from a YouTube comment
from someone using the name Rick Harrison asking,
"What would happen if we pour liquid nitrogen onto lava?"
I have no idea if this is the actual Rick Harrison from Pawn Stars,
but we're going to try it because it's cool experiment,
not because of who asked.
[Music]
We've got our arc furnace all set up.
We've got some pieces of lava rock,
and we've got a dewer full of liquid nitrogen.
I've got a safety mask, thick old gloves,
and everything is set up to try and make some lava.
The idea here is pretty simple.
We're gonna melt down some lava rock in our arc furnace,
and then we're going to try pouring it into a bowl of liquid nitrogen.
After that, we'll melt down a little bit more,
and see what happens if we pour the liquid nitrogen onto the lava.
Grant has had some other videos showing
how he went about making this arc furnace,
but the basic idea is that when it's turned on,
when you get these two leads together,
they begin to arc,
and you can then control where it blasts thousands of degrees of heat,
and it's enough to melt down most kinds of metal and most types of rock.
We've had one experiment before where we did melt some of this lava rock down,
and were able to pour it out into some sand,
and that's basically what we want to do again,
except this time, instead of pouring it in the sand,
we want to pour it into liquid nitrogen.
[Music]
All right, let's melt some lava rock.
[Music]
We kind of go through those little glass dishes.
They're cheap.
That was cool.
All right, so that was...
I don't know.
Looks like about half a teaspoon of lava
being poured down into some liquid nitrogen,
and it definitely made the liquid nitrogen
start boiling like most things do.
Then of course, it hit the glass,
and there is a huge heat difference
between the hundreds of degrees below zero nitrogen,
and the probably thousands of degrees above zero liquid lava,
and the glass couldn't take quite that much stress.
All sorts of fun noises from our crucible
as the lava inside cools back down,
and contracts a little bit.
We tried pouring a little bit of our lava into some liquid nitrogen,
and it cooled it down rapidly,
broke the container it was in,
but now we're going to try the opposite,
and try pouring some liquid nitrogen into our lava.
[Music]
Lava and liquid nitrogen.
Obviously, we only have the ability to create very small amounts of lava
with the tools we have here,
but I'd be pretty interested to see this experiment scaled up
to the point where we could really pour
a good amount of lava into something.
You're gonna have to research the best way to do that.
Pouring our lava into the liquid nitrogen,
it cooled down rapidly forming these little black glass beads,
and pouring the liquid nitrogen onto our lava, it did cool down,
but not as fast as I thought it would.
I went through about a cup of liquid nitrogen pouring it on,
and the lava inside was solidified, but it was still glowing orange.
So it had a ton of heat in it.
Keeping in mind that so far,
we only had the ability to make very small amounts of lava,
are there any other things you'd like to see us do with it?
We can get maybe a teaspoon of lava to pour out of this thing.
One of the main restrictions is that as we use the arc furnace,
it heats up the carbon rods,
and then the heat even begins to go into the vice grips
that the carbon rods are attached to.
So after not too long, it gets too hot,
even through my thick leather furnace gloves.
That limits how long we can keep it going,
and how much lava we can make.
But with that amount of lava,
is there anything cool you'd like to see us pour it on to?
Thank you YouTube user Rick Harrison for your suggestion.
Check your YouTube inbox, we're sending you 25 bucks.
Remember, if you suggest something that we use to make a video,
we'll send you $25.
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