Hey guys, I'm Nate welcome back to the dome where today!
We're gonna be doing some experiments using salt and seeing what happens if we melt it down in our foundry some other channels have already
Done some experiments using molten salt, and I figured it was our turn to give it a shot so today
We're going to take a look at melting salt and see what we can learn about it
We'll see how long it takes to melt in our foundry, and we'll see how long it stays a liquid
We'll take a look at what it looks like when it is a liquid how thick is it?
What color is it and just try and learn what molten salt is like?
Of course we will need to be careful because table salt melts at almost
1500 degrees Fahrenheit
So by the time its liquid is going to be dangerously hot
depending on how our
Experiments go today in the future
We may try pouring molten salt into things onto things or dipping things into the molten salt itself. Let's fire up the foundry
All right our salt is now molten and it took 17
Maybe 18 minutes to get to the point where it was really nice and liquid
And then we let it sit in our foundry for just a couple minutes more to make sure that we really got it up to
Temperature now. I'll use the tongs
I'll take the whole crucible out of the foundry, and I'll set it on the bottom of a pot
I had turned over. That'll give us a nice metal base, so it will just burn the ground that it's sitting on
It might burn some of the coating on my metal pot but
It's hot
It's a quick demonstration of how hot this is is just piece of wood. Let's dip that in and see what happens to it
Instantly lights on fire let's try that again
Instantly lights on fire again. Take the metal tongs, and I dip those in
Light on fire
But they get coated with salt pretty nice. It's just a thin
layer of salt built up on the tongs right there as
It cools off. It's still putting off some orange glow
But it's getting less and less
And I'm starting to be able to see down through it like I can see the bottom of the crucible
So I think this stuff is pretty clear in terms of color. That's a very thin viscosity
The way that moves around in the container. It's almost water lightly
Salt is not so liquid once we scoop it out. I think it's definitely cooling down now we have almost like a salt
Slush, it doesn't look quite as warm, but you can see that it still burns the piece of wood almost immediately
So it is cooler, but it's not cold
Let's pour a little bit more salt on top of this and throw it back in the furnace get it back to nice and runny
This time we'll put the lid on
That might speed up the process the fact that our crucible is already extremely hot should also make it go faster
Over where we have the foundry inside the dome. It's actually quite dark
There's not a ton of light getting and except through the main door so we've moved over here by the door
To get a lot more light because the salt
I don't think will always be glowing orange that much
You may have seen that as soon as I took some of the salt out of the crucible
It didn't look like it was glowing anymore
And I think it's just because it was so dark that we could see that light being put off so to get a better sense
Of what it looks like with normal lighting we're gonna pour our salt into this pot over here
and see what color it is see how viscous it is and just
Learn about what happens if you pour it out of the crucible into another container
So just by bringing it over here into where we have a little bit more sunlight
Suddenly the crucible doesn't look like it's all glowing orange nearly as much
It's still very warm, and it's still putting off a little bit of orange color. That's considerably less all right so now
We've got our salt, which does still look orange in here?
But let's pour it out into our pot and see what color it looks there
Look how thin and runny that is is the liquid
I'm just gonna pour all of it here we go
There you go, that's not orange anymore, it's just
That really has the consistency of water or something
That's so thin wow it is rapidly cooling off though leave that you can see the salt forming on the sides
It's getting almost a slushy consistency already. It's only been a few seconds
And there you go now
It's starting to form into just crystals again the stuff that I poured onto the bottom of the pot
Cooled down first of course because it was in contact with the metal surface, and the metal surface was cool
And it's cooled down enough and started to shrink that I think it's just completely free
It's not stuck to the bottom of the pot. It's just a piece of salt
Shaking around in there. We also have this one High Point
That's right where I poured it on and I think because it was landing right there first sort of built up a little spot
This is pretty loose. Let's see if we can tip the whole thing out
Seems to come off our pot completely
Somewhat smooth on the bottom
pretty rough on the top
We can see that it no longer has the white color that the salt did when we're pouring it out of its container originally
I'm pretty sure that what is happening is our salt is actually
Picking up a little bit of the trace chemicals and elements inside our crucible and our crucible is made of graphite
So it could be pulling carbon right out of the graphite and that might be what's giving us this grey color
it also might have something to do with the cooling temperature and
Situation in which it forms back into a crystal. Well. It's making a lot of cool noises
It's making lots of clicking sounds and since it's sitting on top of the metal pot upside down
I think that's sort of amplifying our sound a little bit. There was a spot of salt here that splashed out
I'm not touching it either right now because it's still very hot I've got this little stick of ice
I think is probably an icicle okay
It's interesting a little white trail
I think that's where from a tiny bit of the salt gets dissolved and then recrystallizes quickly from the water
Salt and ice is fun to play with we might have to do some more experiments with that in the future all
Right our salt has now cooled down. It's been sitting here for
20-30 minutes to get to the point where it was safe to touch
I think so we now just have this biscuit of cooled salt
That's gone back to a crystal formation obviously no longer liquid, but it doesn't look like how it did before it melted
That's for sure. See it's about a quarter of an inch thick maybe a little less
I'm gonna crack it in half and see what looks like on the inside
We've got some interesting layers going on
This first layer here where it cooled most rapidly as it landed on the pan that almost looks like it's just a clear layer. I
Think you could almost see through that nice and smooth that first layer
Maybe a sixteenth of an inch thick and then we have some salt crystal
That is a little bit more opaque colored on the top half
So it's an interesting division, but we've definitely got a crystalline
Structure that's formed here. It's some part of it. I'm not sure if salt is capable of cooling into a non crystalline structure or not
Not very durable I can pretty easily just break it in my hands
And it doesn't really seem like
it takes the shape of what I poured it into. This for example is the bottom and our pot is pretty smooth on the bottom but we've
got lots of bumps and wrinkles and spots where it looked like as it cooled it sort of contorted a little bit, so
unfortunately, I don't think salt would make a very good casting material.
I've got one more test that I feel like I need to try inspired by poking that piece of poured out salt with our icicle
and watching how much it hissed and sizzled.
I'm gonna try melting down some more salt and then dropping a piece of ice into the molten salt see what will happen.
I suspect that the ice will turn the water and then to steam so fast
That it's kind of gonna make the salt spray out of there
so I'm gonna make sure that I can stand a good distance away as
I drop that ice cube in there. Now this time, we're trying out the kosher salt, which
I think is pretty much exactly the same as the other salt is just slightly larger pieces
I've got a little chunk of ice on my shovel
And I'm gonna use that
To drop the ice down into the molten salt because I don't want to be very close to it when it drops in in case
It splashes up everywhere
It popped right out I'm gonna drop it back in it rejects it every time
You just keep jumping out. There's barely any salt in there all right one more time. I missed
That's funny
You can see how much salt gets shot out
These are little beads of salt that I think cooled down someone in the air because it's a cool down. They're probably still very hot
Not much salt left in our container at this point molten salt pretty fun to play with it's very fun consistency
It glows orange as we take it out of the kiln at least while we're in the darkness of the dome
It kind of rejected the ice, cube
We drop that in and they were just pop right back out four times in a row that ice cube
Just got launched out of the crucible and it cools off very quickly after we pour it out
It's fun to see how it forms those crystalline structures on the inside
even though it gets a little bit dirty and doesn't have the same nice white color as it did when we poured it into the
crucible
and speaking of crucibles
I think we've now added a bit of molten salt that has solidified down onto the bottom of it that should ship off pretty easily
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