[Intro music]
Hi, everyone! Welcome back to Cody's Lab.
So today I have some steel wool, and I've got a sample of it inside of this chamber; which is currently under a slight vacuum
about negative...
five inches of mercury, and the chamber is otherwise filled with air. So let me zoom in here.
Focus the camera on the steel wool. And now I'm going to apply 12 volts DC
to this steel wool between those two stainless steel wires that you can see.
[Electric crackle]
As you can see, the steel wool burned a little bit.
The electricity provided enough heat to cause the iron to
melt, and oxidize in the air; and that reaction was self-sustaining for a little while.
If I had a larger piece of it together. I could get it to burn a little bit longer,
But now let's try taking another
similarly sized piece of steel wool putting it in there, but this time, let's do it with pure oxygen.
Same pressure, but the atmosphere will contain no nitrogen. Okay, you can see that I've vacuumed out the chamber
Now, I'm going to use my torch here to back-fill it with pure oxygen.
Here it is
Now, if you'll recall from my previous videos. The reason why I'm not fully pressurizing the chamber
is because I don't want it to blow the door off.
Cuz this will generate some heat and gas expands my heats up hook my battery back up to the system here goes
12 volts being applied to steel wool and an atmosphere of pure oxygen
safety squints engaged
Well, that was great in fact the stainless steel wire is actually burning
I think I'm gonna add air now
Okay
Can't say I was expecting the stainless steel the burn I mean this is very thick and
Stainless steel is notoriously hard to burn
But I guess in pure oxygen it will
Crazy
Okay
Okay, let's try this again but in an atmosphere of safe argon or something that won't support combustion
CC I've got our cylinder of argon here that I'm using to fill up chamber. Once again, we're going to stop it at
Negative five just so our consistent
Right there
Now let's see what the electricity does to the steel wool
So here's a piece of that stainless steel wire, let me heat this up with a blowtorch
As you can see it does not burn in the air but in the pure oxygen it burned just fine
It's amazing what changing the oxygen concentration from 20 percent up to 100 percent can do
the reason it does this is
You're not having to heat up all that inert nitrogen
So the flame becomes much more efficient and even though it's got chrome and nickel and stuff added to the steel
Which makes it pretty inert it can still burn in oxygen atmosphere
And of course the steel wool burns instantly in the pure oxygen
And you wouldn't normally expect iron to burn
What it does, especially if you make it very fine and give it some o2 now. I hope you enjoyed. I'll see you next time
So for today's ending clip
I'm actually coming to you from the inside of a hotel room here in California
Because for the first time I am going to be attending VidCon
It's a little bit late now for you guys to get tickets
I'm not a featured creator, so I didn't feel the need to sell a bunch of tickets for them
But if you happen to already be coming and you see me, feel free to say hello