What's up guys welcome back to the King of Random kitchen
you guys have been asking for it
you guys have been waiting for it
so in today's episode I'm finally doing it
I'm teaching you how to make liquid nitrogen
I've been really hesitant to put out a video
on how I make liquid nitrogen
because honestly
my setup isn't very professional
It's all jury-rigged together
realize you guys don't really care what it looks like you're more interested in
how its functions so that's what we're getting into today now if you go outside
and take a deep breath you're filling your lungs with about 20% oxygen 79%
nitrogen and 1% of other gases now the first step in making liquid nitrogen is
just to take the regular atmosphere and compress it into some kind of a
container that can hold it under [ pressure ]
once it's under pressure we can pass it through a nitrogen membrane which will
separate the oxygen and the other gases leaving pure nitrogen gas behind but
there's one other problem the nitrogen might have some moisture associated with
it and we don't want any moisture so the next step is to pass that gas through
some kind of mechanism that dries it out now in one of the secret compartments of
my room I have this nitrogen generator that does all that for me and I really
have to give credit where credit's due to my friend Chris Roberts who really
made all this possible he's the one that located all the items he sourced all the
equipment he helped put it all together and he helped it get to the functioning
state that it is today now once we've got the clean dry nitrogen gas we need a
place to store it my friend Chris went down to Harbor
Freight and pick up a little tank for about 20 bucks that we use to store that
nitrogen gas under pressure and we added a little regulator so we can turn a knob
and regulate how much gas flows out and now it might seem a little bit too
simple but that's half the battle in making liquid nitrogen
once we've got dry nitrogen seeping out at about 1 psi all we have to do is get
it cold enough that it liquefies and this is where we bring in the helium
compressor now helium compressor unit is basically just a glorified air
conditioning unit the whole purpose of this existence is to get colder than the
boiling point of nitrogen now helium has a boiling point around minus 452 degrees
Fahrenheit which is way below the boiling point of liquid nitrogen
I think it's Boyle's law that says if you take a gas and compress it and then
let it cool back down if you rapidly expand it that gas will get very very
cold and because we're using helium we can compress it cool that gas down and
rapidly expand it to a temperature that's lower than the boiling point of
liquid night so now that you've got the basic concept
let me explain in a little bit more detail how a helium compressor works
it's charged up with helium gas in a closed-loop system the helium gas is
compressed where it keeps up tremendously and we need some kind of a
system to cool it down which I'll talk about in just a minute but once it is
cooled down it can travel to the cryo head where it's rapidly expanded and
cooled down to a temperature lower than the boiling point of nitrogen so what
would happen if we had a surface that was colder than the boiling point of
liquid nitrogen and we had a small vapor of nitrogen gas blowing at it that's
right it's going to condense and is going to form small droplets and drip
down to ground now if we're able to catch those droplets into some kind of a
glorified thermos a Dewar if you will then theoretically over time those
droplets would add up and produce bucketfuls of liquid nitrogen and that's
it guys that is exactly how we make liquid nitrogen hey guys just stepping
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all right guys time is up back to the video I'll be back up for a second and
just talk about the cooling system we used for the Gila
compressor which is pretty cool because it's just jury-rigged out a
three-component my friend Chris and I start out by building a housing for the
furnace blower and the radiator so we could suck in tremendous amounts of air
and blow it through the radiator and cool down all the liquid inside next we
ran some poly hoses from the radiator all the way back to the helium
compressor where it runs through a heat exchanger where it soaks in all the heat
from the compressed helium runs it back to the radiator and cools down once
again and this whole system is powered by a sump pump that I got from Home
Depot for about 20 bucks I just built it so it sits inside of a little bucket
inside of a bigger bucket that way if any water splashes out it's not going to
damage our electronics now the sump pump runs on normal house power about 120 AC
but the nitrogen generator and the helium compressor run on 240 and by now
I know you've probably got two questions on your mind how much energy does
actually use and how much nitrogen gets generated cats are the first question I
don't really know how much power it uses but it's not enough to make a difference
in our monthly electric bill and answer the second question how long does it
take to make well to make 30 litres which fills up my Dewar it takes about
three weeks remember guys we not only have to get the Dewar cold enough where
it can hold liquid nitrogen without evaporating but then we have to fill it
the rest of the way up by drip by drip and that takes a really long time so
where do you find all this equipment well honestly we found it on Amazon eBay
and we found it at university surplus and as long as you can find a nitrogen
compressor with a nitrogen membrane a helium compressor a cryo head and Jimmy
rig your own liquid cooling system you could probably make one of these for
yourself but as my friend nurdrage says I'm going to have to crush your
expectations because even jury-rigging it together yourself it's still going to
cost you a lot of money I've got about a thousand maybe $1,300 and see unit I've
got here so when we draw it out like this it kind of looks like a complicated
system and there are a lot of moving parts but what it comes down to our two
main essentials dry nitrogen gas meeting a very cold surface the nitrogen
condenses gets liquefied and then gets captured into some kind of a container
that can keep it nice and cold and that's it that's the basics of making
liquid nitrogen in a nutshell so there you have a guy's mystery solved you now
know how to make liquid nitrogen by pulling nitrogen right out of the air
and getting it so cold that it liquefied hey thanks for joining me for this video
I'll be looking for you the next one talk to you then liquid nitrogen due to
paper shiny and wet just like a liquid now our paper is really really cold