*Opening Sequence*
Hi everyone welcome back to Cody's Lab
So today I'm gonna build a liquid oxygen condenser
The idea is I'm going to gav something
that I can put liquid nitrogen in
And then a thin tube
in this case copper
That can run oxygen gas through
to liquify the oxygen
Pretty straightforward
Let's get to it
*bottle rattles*
So I have this propane cylinder which is empty
and I'm just going to cut the top off of it here
to make a cylinder that I can fill with liquid nitrogen
I'm of course going to have to insulate that
I was originally planning on using
a stainless steel drinking flask
Uh see you have one of these cut open
You can see its got a
empty space in there which is normally filled with absolutely nothing
that forms a insulated barrier
that keeps your drink warm or cold
also stainless steel is really good
at dealing with very low temperatures
but unfortunately stainless steel is apparently very difficult to weld or solder to so
steel will do just fine
There we go that's cut off
and I've got my cylinder
uh... the cut could be straighter but that'll work
So there's my coil as you can see
looks pretty nice, it's a little dirty but it should work
and here's the can of course that I'll be putting the nitrogen in
I've got to put a hole in the bottom of this to feed the coil through
Cus it's going to be inside of the can just like that
This little thing on the bottom, there's a piece of metal right there
now I was going to just pry this off
but on closer inspection
it looks as though it's actually braised on there
yeah ya see down in there
there's a little bit of brass that's weeped through the metal
So
That's uh
not gonna really pry off
and really, since it's been braised up with brass
It shouldn't cause me any problems cus
I'm gonna be braising this in there anyway
Let's see if I can braise this up without melting through that thin copper tubing
Here we go
I think that's going to seal pretty well
Let's just touch that up right there get the little pinhole
Now that I have this thing mostly complete
It's time to clean it up so that I can use oxygen in it
This tubing came from a mini fridge and so I probably have a little bit of the uh
Pump lubricant
inside the tube so I need to get rid of that
because it could react with the oxygen so I'm just gonna run some acetone through there
to dissolve it away
flush out any oils
And of course acetone is also flammable so I'm going to be putting it in the oven for a little while
to bake it and drive off any acetone and possibly anything else I can bake out
Now it's time to insulate it
I'm going to use a combination of styrofoam pellets
and expanding foam
so I'm going to sit this inside of this
two liter bottle
and I'm going to fill the inside of the bottle
So I'm just about ready to put this thing to the test
So you can see I've got it hooked up to this oxygen bottle there
This nitrogen is colder than the boiling point of oxygen so it should be able to condense it
Gonna take a while for this to cool off
now to solve that problem I'm going to poke a hole
in the bottom of this little thing
and this is only temporary so
that wasn't meant to be a permanent base for this
so it shouldn't be a problem in the future
It's submerging most of the coil
that should be good enough for this test
Okay so I'm turning the oxygen on now
Let's see if we get any liquid to flow through
I'd say that is
Yeah... I got liquid shooting out of there
Excellent. Turn this oxygen off
It should stop flowing through
Let's see what happens if I just blow through it and uh
It's actually sucking air through this tube naturally
oxygen, it's liquifying the oxygen in the air
that's cool
I did not expect that result
Let's see what happens if I blow the air through it
It's kind of cool to see the air that I'm blowing through it
coming out as a slow trickle of liquified oxygen
which is also being sprayed out with nitrogen that doesn't liquify
It's kind of cool to see that that's the amount of oxygen that's sitting in the volume of the air in my lungs
Of course there's also water and CO2 that I'm blowing out
Which is probably getting froze up inside of the coil
Which is not good for it, in fact, I'll have let this completely thaw out with the system
So here's a really strong magnet and here's the oxygen I produced
And you can see it's actually magnetic
It's highly contaminated, probably a lot of water, ice, CO2 or even argon
floating around in there
But that is oxygen. I could filter it out
Use it for various things including rocket fuel
So I'm amazed at how much air this thing draws through itself passively
I can actually hear the nitrogen bubbling down in the test tube as the air gets sucked through
The nitrogen releases as a gas and the oxygen trapped as a liquid
Let's show you how much I made after just a few minutes in here
Yeah I had to put a tube on that to help get it into the test tube
Let's pull my test tube of oxygen out of there
There it is
You see it's still contaminated with ice and uh other things
Watch what happens when I ignite this little piece of paper that's inside this little test tube of oxygen
*nothing happens*
haha... well that's embarrassing isn't it
So I had to think about it a little bit and the reason that the
piece of burning paper didn't immediately ignite when I put it in the test tube
was because the oxygen I was producing with the air
was highly contaminated with liquid nitrogen
Ya see, the oxygen
does boil at a lower temperature than nitrogen
but it's not a hard cutoff see
it's kind of a gradual change between the liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen
So when it's at the liquid nitrogen temperatures, liquid oxygen could dissolve
half it's own volume in liquid nitrogen
which appeared to be the case
Once most of the nitrogen boiled off I could get the paper to ignite however
So yeah there it is
it does work
although it does seem that to get a pure oxygen product
I'm going to have to use a pure oxygen source
Which makes sense but
That'll be a problem that I'll be solving soon with my hydrogen generator
which will be producing oxygen as a byproduct
and uh also I'd like to mention that
It is consuming nitrogen in order to produce the oxygen
It's like I'm trading liquid nitrogen for liquid oxygen
But that's because I can purchase liquid nitrogen
I cannot purchase liquid oxygen
I have tried and the welding shops will not sell it to me
Another think I kind of realized after watching back on my footage is
I'm doing this right next to my methane generator
and you might be able to hear it burp every now and then
because it is producing gas at this point
So it might be a bad idea to you know be
having open flames so near it
but of course it is currently producing CO2 so it's not a problem at the moment
and also this garage is apparently leaky
a lot of windows don't seal properly so the gas doesn't really build up
Anyway, hope y'all enjoyed and I'll see you next time
*outro*