Hi everyone, welcome back to Cody's lab
So today I wanted to make thermite but challenged myself to use aluminum foil rather than the aluminum powder normally used
'luminum foil is after all still rather popular on YouTube, right?
So this will be probably a lot more difficult due to the larger, you know thickness of the particle
it's all one particle, but
I still think I can do it. So let's give it a shot, shall we? So to get started, I've placed approximately 2 square
nano light seconds of aluminum foil out onto the table
This has a mass of approximately 5 times 10 to the 24th AMU and I have also measured out the correct
Stoichiometric amount of iron oxide to react with it roughly three times the mass of aluminum in order to have a successful
reaction, the two materials must be in intimate contact
If they are not touching each other, if they are not in close contact, they will never react.
Also, we need a high activation energy, and the activation energy, the lower the better. We can connect them. So what I'm doing is
Mixing a little bit of water in with the iron oxide
So as to make a slurry that I can spread around on the foil
You might have noticed this is shiny side down
The dull side is a little bit rougher
So it should adhere to the iron just a little bit better. For the uninitiated
Thermite is a mixture of a metal and a metal oxide. Given the right conditions
this undergoes a redox reaction in which the oxygen
switches its allegiance to the more reactive metal and releasing loads of energy in the process.
Okay. So here we go. Looks like it's a pretty well spread
The iron is very dense. And so the layer is actually quite thin
So now we got to remove the water. So let's go take this and put it in the oven
So, here we are, just push that into the oven
Now before you start thinking about saving energy and drying this out just in the air
Iron oxide absorbs water and it actually chemically reacts with it to form a hydrate and that hydrate doesn't break down
Until the temperature is quite high so it does
Actually have to be oven-dried
It shouldn't take too long and there is no chance of it igniting inside the oven because the
activation energy for this reaction is a lot higher than what I can produce
just with this thing. So now that the foil has been oven dried. You can see that it's a little less red
But now we don't have any water that's gonna be vaporizing and
Producing gas and also absorbing heat. So now we want this to be as close as possible to
a powdered mixture but one of our materials is not a powder so we can't just mix it
Fortunately, we already have the iron
stuck to the aluminum. And it'd be nice if we had the aluminum on both sides of the iron. So let's just roll it up
So the difference between powder and this foil it's kind of like the difference between trying to light
dry grass on fire
Or lighting a piece of plywood on fire
Both are perfectly possible to light
But the dry grass only requires a spark or a lit cigarette
Thrown into it
Whereas a piece of plywood requires sustained heating for long periods of time
You can't just use a match on it
So what I'm doing here is essentially chopping up the plywood into smaller pieces so it more resembles the dry grass
Okay. I'm just folding this over. So the iron oxide is completely
Encapsulated by the aluminum. So now I'm going to take my rusty foil burrito and
Run it through this roller mill
This will smash the aluminum and iron together
forcing them to be in better contact
The iron oxide is actually in the form of small crystals and I'm basically embedding those crystals into the aluminum
Also, this is gonna make the aluminum thinner so it's like taking your plywood and
separating the plies making it
Easier to light. So hopefully by the end of this it'll be more resembling cardboard
I probably won't get it that thin but
Any amount of thinning will help
You could do this with a hammer. I presume
but that kind of energy on the impact. You might actually be risking a spontaneous ignition.
After running it through a few times the aluminum is getting quite brittle and has started to crack
And what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna kind of fold it in on itself
Fold it in half
and once more
And there we are
Have smashed together a few times you can see the aluminum is becoming quite brittle
In fact, if I were to keep going this I might end up with a powdered mixture
Let's go hit this with the torch and see if it'll light
For ignition. I will be using an oxyacetylene torch
because
Little blow torch just won't cut it
There we go. I'm just gonna kind of hit it at the edge
I think that's
Pretty decent thermite reaction. It's not very quick
But it did consume the entire thing
So, I think that's pretty good
Now the iron is in little beads strewn all throughout it
but I think but I think if we did more and had a way to
You know conserve heat we might be able to do something with that
So as you can see the sun's already starting to come up, but I've got the same thing I had before
Multiplied by 10. I've also got it sitting inside of a crucible
So is to conserve heat - that way, it'll stay liquid longer, hopefully
So let's get this lit up and see what happens
Okay
It's off
It just went out let's try that again
There we go. Now we're rocking
Okay
We can pour that out
Actually broke my crucible
Let's have a look at this down here
Yeah, there's our slag and there's the iron
Okay
Yeah, it is iron, it's very brittle though it just snapped like a, oh, like a piece of glass or something
That is our iron
It's still rather hot. That's probably one reason why it broke so easily
Yeah, it's highly contaminated with gases and stuff
There you go, it's a pretty good proof of concept I think
That is thermite using aluminum foil
Hope you enjoyed I'll see you next time!
See if I can roast a marshmallow over this superheated thermite slag
Looks like it's getting a little brown
Ooop! It lit
- Let me zoom out
Mmm! Toasty!