Hey guys welcome back to the King of Random cooking show where today were cooking with a fun little chemical called potassium chlorate.
Now's that time of year where these little marshmallow peeps are popping up all around the local grocery store.
So i ran down to pick up a few boxes to see if it would assist us with out chemical experiment today
Now in addition to these seasonal flavors here, I also picked up some pink bunny rabbits as well as some white Easter eggs
not that it makes any kind of a difference to the reaction itself
,but it just adds a little variety
So what exactly is potassium chlorate? Well let me tell you a little bit about this cool chemical substance I have in my possession today.
As you can see potassium chlorate is a very fine white
crystalline substance now this stuff's been reduced down to a very very fine
powder because it's used for pyrotechnics I got this stuff from a
pyrotechnic supply company because it's a very strong oxidizer used in
manufacturing fireworks but it's also the main component in the match heads
you have in your boxing matches at home it's a very reactive material once it's
mixed with a fuel but by itself it actually won't burn instead if we can
throw enough heat at it we can actually get it to melt down because it's
actually got a melting point around 672 degrees Fahrenheit so this is the
purpose of our experiment today let's melt down our potassium chlorate into a
hot molten bath then take one of our little marshmallow peeps and let them go
for a swim and observe what happens it really looks and feels a lot like
powdered sugar that should be more than enough it's a quick update on what I'm
thinking here guys we're going to get this stuff up to about 700 degrees
Fahrenheit and I'd really like the reaction to take place inside of a glass
now the problem is glass is sensitive to
thermal shock and if we take a blowtorch to it it will probably shatter into a million pieces.
So what im hoping we could do is liquify the potassium chlorate in the pan first and transfer it slowly
into the glass where it may have a little bit better chance of staying
intact if it does we should be good to go and if it doesn't we'll just find
another way I'm using a map gas torch which produces a very very hot flame so
I'm just going to sweep that back and forth over the white powder until it
liquifies and I've never actually liquidfied potassium chlorate before so
I'm very interested to see how this looks
glasses on for safety let's rock
there we go you'd actually already see at the top
there parts of it are liquifying and melting down and the edges here are
spewing looks like they're reacting with something maybe that's the nonstick
surface of the pan itself not exactly sure but doesn't look like it's taking
too much to melt this down it's definitely a different reaction than if
you were to try this with sugar the sugar would just burn and turn black you
can see this is turning into a very translucent liquid syrup
it's not sticking anymore that's a good sign our potassium chloride is
completely molten now it's not even sticking to the pot anymore so let's go
ahead and transfer it to glass my only concern is whether or not the glass will
hold up there's a possibility it will just crack and splatter this stuff
everywhere that glass warmed up a little bit very
carefully make the transfer
cool holding up so far now that we've got our potassium chlorate completely
liquefied let's take one of our fruit punch flavored peeps and let them go for
a swim pretty oh this one looks like he's crying oh don't worry little buddy
it'll be over soon that's so wrong isn't it what's going to
happen three two one
oh my goodness oh my goodness
oh there goes a glass that is crazy I can't believe how quickly that took off
this looks like instant reaction just burst right into flames like the second
it made contact there was barely enough time to get my hands away guys you got
to come check this out there is nothing left of that red peep look it is
completely disintegrated all that's left is a little tiny bit of black ash
residue but other than that it is gone you can see our potassium chlorate has
actually solidified again back into this big white blob look there goes el sweet
so it looks like this stuff is castable look at that I just cast it into a cone
shape that's kind of fun that reaction took off immediately burst into these
bright magenta pink flames very very vigorous and produced a lot of smoke
that was pretty cool and you can see from the heat of the reaction the glass
actually did end up exploding everywhere which is why I put this plate underneath
it so we could recapture some of the potassium chlorate and use it again it's
expensive stuff you know for our next experiment I thought it would be fun to
try one of these decorated marshmallow Easter eggs so let's recapture some of
our potassium chlorate melt it down and let it up
oh there goes the glass look at that egg glass is done so you get for getting
your glass at the dollar store okay so that was kind of expected when I poured
the potassium chloride into the glass it sat there for like just a couple of
seconds and then completely shattered because it wasn't able to withstand the
thermal shock we're down to our last glass here I'm not very confident it's
going to hold up either let's go ahead and put it to the test anyway you see
there are chunks of glass still stuck in there but those are going to come right
out in solution
let's see how those glass pieces are free now freedom and the separate the
night out will the glass survive here we go alright so far so good let's go ahead
and throw in our egg I'm going to be a little bit guts here now that I've got
the tongs here here we go and contact
Wow okay I was going to say look underneath there look at the color of
those flames see how you got like beautiful magenta pink some orange in
there so as much as I wanted to do these experiments in glasses they're not
holding up very well to the heat you can see that just within a few seconds of
pouring the molten potassium chlorate oh there goes the plate plate just cracked
so as much as I want to do this reaction inside of glass containers they don't
hold up very well to the heat at all you can see that within a few seconds of the
liquid making contact with the glass it shatters and spills out the molten
material and then it very quickly solidifies and the reaction stops so for
our next experiment let's try placing our peeps down below and melting the
potassium chlorate from above so it drips down on the marshmallow and watch
what happens in that scenario
there and I'm just going to let that cool down and solidify she give us a
nice little chunk cuz you gotta enter so here we are I've got a nice chunk of our
chlorate melted down and Risa Lydda fide now we're just going to hold a flame to
it and drip it down onto our peeps
that's so cool you can see how it balls up on the top and then just explodes
boom
this stuff drips off when it hits the marshmallow it has such a vigorous
reaction it just explodes sweet let's do that again but a little bit longer
what we saw in that last experiment was a lot more stability and control because
we were able to regulate the flow of potassium chlorate down onto the peeps
themselves when the stuff actually hit the peeps it seemed to ball up into a
very vigorous reaction and then explode for one final experiment let's mix up
one large batch of molten potassium chlorate in the pan itself and take a
whole peat party and throw the whole lot in at once
that's so cool huh
oh look at that guys we have a huge pot full of molten potassium chlorate let's
get ready for the Big Finish let's do it Pete Pete Pete we don't want these guys
to be left out of the party
the smoke coming off that's incredible whoo and look at those flames
we've got magenta we've got pink we got kind of like purplish whitish flames
going on in there as well and the reaction just died out does that mean we
used up all of our potassium chlorate that quickly what or did it just
solidify and look yeah all the potassium chlorate is gone that's amazing that
burned up so fast look at that goopy glue a mass of molten
pipi marshmallows this one's still growing look at that that looks pretty
trippy check that out these marshmallows are still on fire though from the heat
of the reaction let's stop and take just a second to recap what we did here today
we learned about a chemical called potassium chlorate that's used as an
oxidizer and building fireworks it's normally a crystal or a fine white
powder but if we get a hot enough it'll completely liquefy we found that if we
mix this molten potassium chlorate with peeps it bursts into a very vigorous
reaction of pink purple and magenta flames very appropriate for Easter we
also found that the liquid is so hot that if we pour it into a glass it'll
shatter within seconds due to the thermal shock
so we tried dripping it onto the piece from above where we saw the reaction
caused it to ball up and explode we finished up our experiments with a whole
pan full of liquid chlorate and threw in a whole Easter party it beeps at once
that reaction took off very vigorously producing a lot of black smoke and even
brighter purple pink and even white flames that we hadn't seen before
very cool chemical experiments and the perfect day to do them we also
discovered that even using all that potassium chlorate it was still the
limiting factor in the reaction because it disappeared before all the
marshmallows did well there you have it hey thanks for joining me for this
experiment guys it's been fun hanging out with you peeps and I'll be looking
for you the next video talk to you that if I was addicted to
any white substance it probably testing for a chlorate
you