What do you think would happen if we dripped the concentrated sulfuric acid onto the head of the match
I've been reading a book that says you can use this technique as an improvised pyrotechnic igniter
So the purpose of this experiment is to find a match
Let's put it to the test.
Yohis jar of sulfuric acid from a previous video where we extra
Sulphuric acid ranks very high on the Ph scale
It's a very reactive acid especially when it's in concentrated form and that's why we're taking safety precautions today
I've also got a bowl of baking soda water standing by here, baking Soda will help neutralize
The acid if we spill any in fact, if we take a couple of drops and just drip it down in the center
You can see it immediately reacts and neutralize the acid, so this is our back-up plan in case anything goes wrong today
I'm using a little plastic pipette here this plastic is not reactive with Sulfuric acid, and we don't need much
We're just going to grab a couple of drops there and hold it in the tip
You can see if I squeeze it
We can get it to come out one drop at a time, now according to my book
We should be able to take one drop of sulfuric acid and put on the match head and watch it burst to flames
But instead you can see it just sits there. This is very interesting
I'm definitely seeing the sulfuric acid reacting with the match head it is bubbling
And it changes color if it gets down onto the Matchstick
It actually soaks some of the moisture out of the wood and Chars it and turns it Brown
But our matches are not bursting in a flame
And that's what we're looking for. I can actually smell some fumes coming off of that. So there is some reaction taking place
You can see some discoloration
We add a little bit more acid see if that'll speed the reaction
But that's kind of disappointing isn't it? So a match in this condition doesn't seem to very easily burst into flames now interestingly enough
I have a friend called nurdrage who put up a video recently as well doing the same experiment
I don't know if he's reading the same books as me
But he tried the same experiment and what he found is that using laboratory grade sulfuric acid you actually can get a reaction
But he did a follow-up video showing that actually took a lot of different tries and a lot of different fails before some of the matches would go off
Nurdrage did get it to work however failed more times than he succeeded
I'd like to see a little more reliable method for igniting Matches with Sulfuric acid
And I think I've come up with a little trick that'll do just that
Now I'm playing around I figured out a way to make this work
100% of the time with a slight modification
And all you're going to need is a plate a spoon and a couple of matches from your Matchbox
I find what works well for me is to place my finger into the spoon and then crush the match head on two of its sides and
Then you can use the side of the spoon just to scrape off all that match head powder and remove any pieces of wood
Now, If we take the back of the spoon and just crush this into a fine powder
It's going to increase the surface area which will make it a lot more reactive with the acid
All right, we'll make a nice little pile and the match head powder is a lot finer now. That should make a big difference
Udius
Haha that's a dramatic difference
Dont do drugs, now the head of your safety matches are very small, but they contain an amazing array of chemicals
Not only is their potassium chlorate
But there's also a wood, glue, starch, sulfur, carbon and a few other materials that act as a fuel to help facilitated reaction
When we strike a match. So what exactly is happening to get the match to ignite, according to my friend
Nurdrage, the Sulfuric acid reacts with the potassium chlorate to form an acid called chloric acid
Chloric acid is very unstable and the reaction generates enough heat to ignite the fuels in the match head and make it spontaneously combust
Beautiful and of course the more match powder you use the bigger your reaction will be?
Very nice. This is going to be good
Now this kind of match acid igniter could be used for all kinds of applications not just chemistry experiments
but if you rigged up some kind of an acid time delay
You can drip acid on here and use it to ignite a firework safety fuse for setting off pyrotechnics and fireworks
Check this out just for fun. I whipped up a batch of
Pyrotechnic play buttons using some of our initiater let's go drop some sulpuric acid on this thing and see how it reacts
Oh wow!
That looks amazing
(Inaudible)
whoa
very cool
So there you have it guy's, a simple modification for making match heads react with sulfuric acid to make
a cool Pyrotechnic display,
Hey, thanks so much for joining me for this experiment. I'll be looking for you the next one. Talk to you then
What?