Wow! Something happened
Hi, everyone welcome back to Cody's lab
So I actually got to watch the Cassini spacecraft launch and I stayed up through the night for its orbital insertion
around Saturn and the Huygens probe landing on Titan and
You know the lakes of methane and
I Was wondering what would happen if you struck a match on Titan?
Well there's no oxygen in the atmosphere so not a whole lot would happen
But it gets me thinking look if you have a source of oxygen. How would that flame look?
So today, I'm gonna find out
I've got a canister of hydrocarbon in this case propane
But basically the same. Got a canister of oxygen there, and I can put them in one at a time
And I've got a vacuum chamber which I can replace the atmosphere at will. Let's get a little closer look here
So you can see I've got a tube going in underneath of this
Right there
Which narrows down to a little nozzle
where I have a
Spark for ignition. You can see on this gauge here I've got a slight vacuum pulled. That's so the lit
Chamber does not pop off
so let's first run the propane into the chamber which still has mostly air and
Let's see how the flame looks
That way we have something to compare to of course. We all know what a candle looks like right
Okay, so we have an atmosphere of air
The middle spark and you might be able to see the little glass tube or the gas is gonna come through
I'm actually going to
Put a little bit of propane gas through that, just a second here, propane should be going
turn on the spark
And there we go turn off the spark I can probably turn down the propane that was up there
Here we go
Nice little flickering flame
Of course looks very much like a candle. It's probably flickering because of air currents in there
This is a sudden temperature increase
Now if I just let this burn eventually it would go out due to the production of carbon dioxide and water vapor
Consuming up all the oxygen
But before that happens, I'm actually a shut off
the gas
Let in a little bit of carbon dioxide to extinguish the flame, so now
open that valve I can pull out all the air and
and replace it with propane
[Vacuum chamber noice]
And there we go most of the air has been removed
not all of it, but
there's not enough left to really matter and
Actually if I plug in the spark you should be able to see there's a coronal discharge going
There's not enough air to sustain an actual
Spark like you'd normally see
Let's turn the light off real quick
There you see it just a little bit better, I think
So that's what a spark looks like in a vacuum so anyway, let's
pressurize the chamber with
propane now
Taking it back to about the same pressure we had in the first test
This would probably take a while because it's a pretty small orifice and im blowing it through
Okay, here we go at about 2/3 of an atmosphere
So let's actually see if the spark will even go across through the propane gas it should
Yeah, no problem
The sparking propane
Looks like it is building up a little bit of soot on the electrodes, but
not enough really matter
carbons conductive anyway
Put the propane
We'll flush it the system with some co2
just to keep it from
having a fuel air
mixture in the lines here
Oxygen is going in
There is oxygen burning in a propane atmosphere
Ahh thats working better than i thought. Let me turn the lights off
[Walks away]
[Click noice]
[Walks back]
[Small laughter]
That is different isn't it? theres different colors and everything it's probably burning hotter
No, it's starting to die down. I think that's because my hux didn't take some almost empty
It's making a noise?!
Ooop. It went out
You know what? I wanna to try this out with air see if I can get air into the system how can I do this slow enough?
oh i know
Let's close the stopcock there
Lets connect control the flow with my fingers here
The spark back on
Okay
Okay air does not seem to wanna ignite
I guess that sort of makes sense if you have
a few all its got a lot of
you know dilute n't
Then it has trouble burning
So I really going to see this burning with air
So I can have almost exactly the reverse of a normal fire so i got a little canister here with some compressed air
I'm currently vacuuming out chamber
And we should be able to see that I've got a bit of a flame catch going there
It's just a piece of a fiber glass has to hopefully
Help the flame take hold let's see how the spark works with that there
Oh that looks cool
[Laughter]
The whole thing lights up
[Click noice]
Now let's see if it'll stay in place while I inject the propane
Seems to be doing all right
You can see the little fiber threads waving in the wind
So we're back up the pressure with the propane the
Fiberglass seems to be intact. I'll see if the spark will work. No problem
There we going in
Spark on
Still not getting an ignition with the air let's try upping the quantity of air here
Alright,
That does not seem to be working
And I've let enough air into the chamber now that I'm afraid that it might cause an explosion if I keep going
Probably wouldn't be that bad if it did there's really not that much propane here
This might be something i'll have to revisit
Well I guess I'll just
Add all the air into the chamber
Blow away the rest of the propane
Hope you enjoyed I'll see you next time