Hey what's up guys welcome back
Now today I thought it would be fun to play with some "off the shelf" kitchen chemistry
To prepare for this experiment today I went down to the local supercenter and picked up two main ingredients
A bag of white sugar, and a bottle of drain opener like this.
Now when you get to the drain cleaner aisle
There is going to be two main types of drain cleaners
There is sodium hydroxide and sulfuric acid. This one here is sulfuric acid
sodium hydroxide is really a cool stuff
And you can tell that because they usually put it in another bag for additional protection
This is extremely nasty stuff and it can do a lot of damage
and you definitely don't want to get it on your skin
so it's important to use the right kind of protection
Now this stuff is labeled drain opener but all it really is
is about 96% concentrated sulfuric acid
and if we open up the bottle and pour it out you can see
its a very clear liquid very similar to the
sulfuric acid we extracted from my car battery.
That's essentially all this is, virgin sulfuric acid, with buffer.
Whatever buffer means.
If we dip something like a piece of PH paper in the liquid
you can see it actually tops out on the acidity scale.
Pretty dangerous stuff.
So we got our bottle of drain open, and we've
white sugar now what do you think is going to happen if we mix the two
together so step one I'm just taking a normal drinking glass I'm gonna fill
this up about halfway with white sugar and then step two we're gonna take our
drain cleaner pour it into the glass until the liquid level rises just above
the sugar then we're going to stir that up thoroughly with something like a fork
and then we're just going to watch and see what it does looks kind of nice huh
what's going to delicious right now take it on a nice golden color it's pretty
sweet look at that it's kind of goopy kind of
slushy it looks like a coke frosty see it changing color getting kind of syrupy
it's actually starting to warm up so at this point it's a good idea to insert
back in the way ok so it's been about 30 seconds since
we stirred this sulfuric acid in you can see the liquids turning black nothing
else much seems to be happening though just kind of hanging out if I were to
feel this I can feel the glass warming up it's turning into like a black syrup
oh and it's starting to grow this right here is where the magic happens watch
this
this little black pillar starts rising out of the glass you see the smoke and
the steam coming off there that is vapours of sulfur dioxide and steam if
you were to try this reaction indoors the sulfur dioxide would actually
irritate your eyes making them water like crazy and if it gets into your nose
if you breathe it in it can actually make your nostrils swell making it very
difficult to breathe ask me how I know that even being outdoors you can see the
fumes are irritating my eyes as we speak now you can see the reaction stopped and
we've actually let it cool down for about five minutes so we can touch the
glass this is an exothermic reaction it produces a lot of heat so now that it's
had a chance to cool off a bit let's go ahead and pick up the glass and take a
closer look ooh that is extremely hot that is super super hot I have to keep moving
this thing or it's going to burn my hand and this is after five minutes I'm
actually surprised the glass didn't crack and look what we've got coming out
of here guys we've got a big black charred column of carbon you see how it
arched over and then solidified look at this stuff closely it's very unique and
very interesting it almost looks like lava rock that's spewed on a volcano and
cooled down in the ocean but it's definitely not that hard see if we can
pull it out the glass here yeah look at that
so looking down the glass you can see actually all of the sugar burned up
everything's completely reacted there's no more sulfuric acid no more sugar
everything is completely gone we've got all captured here in this dark and
demonic looking black candy cane that's fantastic now this stuff is pretty firm
I'm surprised is holding up as well as it is but it's still very brittle as
well let me break it apart for you so you can see what it looks like on the
inside so this was the top of the reaction here
this is the stuff that came on the glass first if I take that and just give it a
little twist you can see it breaks right apart and look at all the bubbles that
were formed in there this is a light frothy foam of carbon this is mostly
carbon but there is residue of sulfuric acid on here as well so it might be a
good idea to have some baking soda solution nearby so you could neutralize
that acid if you needed to but I'm wearing gloves and I'm comfortable with
the risks right now and I'm finding that this just really
stuff it feels firm but it definitely feels a little bit spongy you can see
all the air pockets in there if I just put it in my hand and squish it a little
bit Wow it turns to ash that's amazing it completely crumbles with this stuff
being carbon makes me wonder if it would be conductive could we make our own
carbon bridges our own carbon electrodes out of sulfuric acid and sugar we should
try that with the arc furnace see if it conducts electricity this is the part
here that was down in the glass I'm going to break that apart for you and it
just snaps cleanly and evenly and without any problem at all and you can
see even though this is firm this is a piece that was down to glass and I think
maybe the sulfuric acid ran out and that's why the reaction didn't continue
this top part is really crumbly but as we get closer to the bottom here oh
that's crumbly as well haha and still really hot ouch that's really hot crazy
crazy how much heat that captures watch this
that's it it's gone easy as that okay cool apparently now we have a process we
can make a black carbon foam with slightly acidic residues let me explain
a little bit about what just happened the sulfuric acid is a dehydrating agent
that means it wants water and sugar has a lot of hydrogen and oxygen atoms in it
so the sulfuric acid violently rips that hydrogen oxygen away to satisfy its need
for moisture that just leaves the resulting carbon which bubbles up and
turns into this frothy foam which very quickly cools and turns into the hard
black substance that we saw this makes me wonder if we mixed up the concoction
put it into a flask like these what's going to happen when the ash hits the
neck of the bottle is the bottles going to build pressure and explode is the ash
going to reform itself and work its way out of the channel normally is nothing
going to happen at all the purpose of this experiment is to find out
I'm going to add a little bit more this time so we get a full reaction you can
see how the sulfuric acid starts out relatively clear and then as it mixes
with the sugar it starts to darken up you know it's interesting about this is
I can't get it all the way to the bottom I think we've got about 60 seconds
before the reaction takes place so we want to get this mixed as much as
possible before that happens the flasks still feels relatively cool when it
starts heating up I'll know it's time to set it down and back away starting to
warm up what's going to happen is the container going to explode here it goes
oh my goodness
oh wow it's spewing ash out of the top like a little sulfuric acid volcano look
at all that steam and sulfur dioxide coming off the top the reaction is still
going but nothing else is coming out is it
is a container already empty I suppose it is we'll need to let that cool down
for a minute where the stuff is pushing out on the top like that it almost looks
like one of those black firework snakes if you light and just growth
if this one is highly acidic I want to get too close to that so the flasks did
not explode but the reaction was a little bit different than I was
expecting as well it seems the carbon sets up so quickly that by the time it
hits the top the pressure breaks it into chunks and spews out kind of like a
volcano spitting ash I was really impressed at how quickly that reaction
took place once it got going once the levels started rising the whole thing
only took about 10 seconds before it was over that is extremely hot this stuff
down here gooey and spongy but very brittle look
at all these pieces of ash that clumped off they look like little lava rocks but
they've got the same weight as styrofoam peanuts they're extremely lightweight
smells like sugar and chemicals it's not extremely pleasant but it's not too bad
either
instant ash brought to you by the King around for one final experiment today I
want to try using a round flask to see what kind of a difference if any that
makes
yeah it's starting to get pretty goopy they're trying to mix it as best I can
it's starting to heat up here goes it's like a black bubbling potion of evil
look at that spattering and spewing everywhere oh gosh there's a lot of
pressure in there it's spitting it out and of building the top at the same time
look at that
weird okay that was unexpected kind of looks like a t-rex like a skeleton t-rex
it's got a little arm sticking out there his open mouth and head spine
okay maybe t-rex is living a stretch but does look really cool so what I saw
happening when this reaction took place is it did get clogged but the pressure
just kept pushing out the carbon and it started spewing chunks up to about four
feet away and what was really interesting is near the top little bits
of carbon would start to collect and form a little tube and it started
building this chamber this black bridge column that just continued one chunk
after another it was amazing very similar I imagined how volcanoes build
themselves as well as the lava flows out the chunks solidified the volcano grows
bigger and that's what we see happening here it even kind of jetted off at a 45
degree angle but it looks really cool very cool reaction I wasn't actually
expecting it to turn out that way but I'm glad that it did interesting
I love the randomness in this design what's amazing to me is there was
actually like a column inside this neck look at that you can see the cavity is
completely filled up but there's a little hole there which I imagine where
everything was spewing what's amazing is that was able to continue this far
that's a good eight inches if we break this in half yeah you can see that hole
continues right through it and if I keep breaking this you can see that hole
continues through the entire length of that neck so we actually made a sulfuric
carbon straw and it looks really cool look at the texture to that awesome
experiments guys let's talk about what just happened we started off with the
classic experiment mixing sulfuric acid with sugar but we did it with a little
bit of a twist rather than using sulfuric acid from a
chemical lab we use sulfuric acid from drain cleaner we found that when the two
substances were mixed nothing really apparent seemed to happen right away
after that we found our container very quickly warmed up and shot up a pillar
of black carbon ash we saw that the big black carbon column pushing up out of
the glass looks a lot like those black snake fireworks you see around the
fourth of July and we found that this is because sulfuric acid is a very strong
dehydrating agent and sucks the moisture out of the sugar leaving nothing but the
black carbon residue next we tried putting this mixture in an
Erlenmeyer flask where the opening constricts near the top to see if we get
the container to explode but rather than exploding we saw the pressure just push
the carbon chunks up and out of the container letting them flop down over
the side for our final experiment we put everything in a round bottom flask where
even more pressure could build up but we still didn't get it to explode instead
what we saw happened was chunks of carbon would spew out up to 4 feet away
and the ones that collected near the top coagulated together and formed a long
carbon tunnel which is something I haven't seen done before well there you
have a guy's great day of experimenting and hopefully you learn something new
thanks for joining me for this set of experiments I'll be looking for you the
next video talk to you then it's a quick update guys some of that black ash
flaked off and it's sticking to my skin and starting to burn I'm going to wipe
that off and come back with my lab jacket I'll be right back it's got a
nice whiff of sulfuric acid it it's kind of a nice setting texture that's
interesting shiny carbon foam