[GRANT] What's up guys welcome back today is an exciting day because today is the day we
get to test out our nitro cotton. Now in yesterday's video we took some extremely
dangerous acids and use them to turn ordinary cotton balls into nitro cotton.
What exactly is nitro cotton? Well you're about to find out. Now these here are
the cotton balls that we worked with yesterday and I've let them sit
overnight so they're about as dry as we can get them, which is good because I
don't think nitro cotton works very well if it's wet. And now if we compare
them to one of our original cotton balls you can see they're a little bit smaller
and they take on kind of a yellowish tinge other than that it just feels like a
cotton ball that got a little bit too wet and then dried out overnight
now you remember yesterday we weighed each of our cotton balls individually
and I'm curious to know today now that they've been nitrated if there's any
difference in weight. All right let's start a cotton ball number one this was
0.55 grams originally and now we're showing 0.80 grams it's kind of like fluctuating
at 0.5 I wonder if that's because there's still a bit of moisture in it or
if it's actually changed weight
okay so I just reweighed all of the cotton balls here and it seems that in
almost every case the cotton ball weighs about 0.3 grams more than it did
yesterday and I'm not sure if that's still because there's a little bit of
moisture in here that's waiting to evaporate off or if the physical
properties of the cotton ball itself has changed but in almost every case the
cotton ball has increased in weight by 0.3 grams interesting now this is the
fun part the moment we've all been waiting for because now we get to burn
it now before we start burning our nitro cotton let's start off burning one
regular cotton ball just so we have a standard to measure it against now to
light this thing off we could just use the flame from a BBQ igniter but that's
a little bit too easy so to switch things up a little bit let's try using
some sparks from a ferrocerium rod and hacksaw blade there we go we have
ignition the cotton ball ignites look at the way it burns the cotton shrinks the
ball turns black as it leaves behind the carbon residue you can see we got a good
25 to 30 seconds of burn time there with regular cotton ball without flame right
there looks cool you need to see the heat rising from the charcoal ash we're
left with now is basically black ash and bring residue and that's got a lot of
smoke coming off it look at all the smoke here with all the smoke
so you can see that gives about 25 to 30 seconds of burn time there's quite a bit
of smoke and the cotton ball doesn't completely burn unless you move it
around and expose it to the oxygen so now let's see how a regular cotton ball
compares to Nitro cotton so this is test number one it's the first cotton ball we
soaked in acid yesterday so theoretically it should be the most
volatile here it is boom there it goes man okay so do you see the difference in
the burn time there the flash cotton actually flash it went up in a huge ball
fire and if you look down here at the res view there's really not much Ash
left over this is the original cotton ball that's at your burning for about
two minutes before it finally died down to this ash and there's still quite a
bit of residue our flash cotton you can see almost everything is gone so cotton
ball one with the success and went up very very quickly even though it was
still in cotton ball form if we would have stretched those fibers out we could
get them go off even faster watch this so we don't have to burn the whole
cotton ball at once we can actually unroll it and give ourselves more
material to work with like so what's really interesting is it still looks
like cotton it's still very fluffy it still acts like cotton it's got a
slightly yellowish tinge to it try ripping off a small piece of fiber like
this and touch it gently with a flame and see just how quickly it goes off
gone in a flash that's why I love this stuff it burns so quickly it disappears
before it even has a chance to at the table it's why they call it flash cotton
folks flash paper and flash cotton is the kind of stuff magicians using their
shows because it burns so quickly it's very dramatic it doesn't leave any
smoke or any ashy residue and guys if you flake off little pieces of your
cotton ball like this you can actually stretch one cotton ball to go an
extremely long way
so we have it to tests down to full successes now the purpose of this
experiment today is really to see how many cotton balls we were able to
nitrate with 80 milliliters of nitric acid we took eight cotton balls soaked
them each individually for five minutes and my question is at what point is the
nitration start wearing off so this may seem like a bit of a waste but what
we're going to do now is burn through each of our cotton balls individually
until we find the point where our flash cotton
stops flashing
bada-boom
whoa someone explosive
very volatile cotton ball number six
a little bit slower a little bit slower and there's a little bit more ashy
residue there number seven
still a good burn but that was a lot slower and you can see there's a lot
more after as well down to our last cotton ball this is number eight and
it's even got a nice little fuse ticking at the top for us
putting off a lot of interesting smoke there look at that it's turning yellow
that's the Tsar is bringing extremely slowly
lots of ash it didn't ignite at all it just kind of fizzled down released a lot
of yellow smoke and turned into this black ash which kind of has the smell of
sulfuric acid they left behind this tar looking stuff as well
crispy black ash and a greasy tar residue so interesting guys so out of 8
cotton balls the first five of them went off perfectly very very quickly it
wasn't until the 6th cotton ball that we noticed a little bit of black ash
residue a little bit more than normal the seventh burn was a little bit slower
and the eighth ball didn't even burn at all I just released a ton of yellow
smoke and melt it down into this black ball of ash so I think based on our
experiment here today we can safely conclude that 80 milliliters of nitric
acid will fully nitrate between 5 to 6 cotton balls now we can actually look at
the weights of our cotton balls and figure out exactly how much cotton that
was so just looking at our numbers here it looks like the first 5 to 6 cotton
balls comes out between about 3 grams to 3.25 grams so my best guess based on
this experiment is that 80 milliliters of nitric acid will successfully nitrate
around 3 grams of cotton and don't forget we nitrated a tampon as well
which is 2.4 grams so theoretically we should be able to get this to work now
our little cotton tampon has a whole heck of a lot of cotton in it so we
could actually stretch it out to last quite a while but I'm thinking let's
just light off this little strip here and if it works let's light off the
whole thing just because we can
beauteous like magic all right so that worked no problem at all so let's go
ahead and fluff this tampon out a bit and set it ablaze we go beautiful all
right here we go flash tampon in three two one dang that
was a wicked fireball and it just went up in my face and it was in an instant
like less than a second that entire tampon was completely burned so we did
it the world's first pyrotechnic tampon Cowabunga dude yeah and look at this
there's hardly any ash at all we've got like little tiny bits of black fiber but
the rest of it is completely gone and no smoke did you see there was no smoke in
that just a huge flash of fire in fact that was quite a bit higher than I was
expecting it would right up into my face and look there's hardly any ash residue
at all if you look down here it's just a little bit of black matter but for the
most part that tampon is gone in its entirety so that was really cool guys
and now based on these results I think we can reach some conclusions from our
experiments here today we start off in yesterday's video taking regular cotton
balls and soaking them in the solution of nitric and sulfuric acid we rinse the
acid off soaked it in baking soda water and then rinse it again and let them dry
overnight to produce a batch of flash cotton the purpose of today's experiment
was to test those cotton balls to identify where the nitration started
dropping off and based on our results we found that happened right around cotton
ball number six now because we use 80 milliliters of nitric acid to brew six
cotton balls that went up in a flash we determined that one milliliter of nitric
acid nitrates about point zero four grams of cotton because our cotton balls
work so well just for fun we went ahead and nitrated a cotton feminine hygiene
product to produce the world's first pyrotechnic tampon so there we have it
guys we now know how to use nitric and sulfuric acids to produce flash cotton
whoa thanks for joining me for this experiment I'll be looking for you the
next one talk to you then all right here we go shower of sparks in three two one
and I missed one two three four five six seven eight
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