Loved this channel since the first video. Hard cutting science facts and good visuals. Speculation based on legitimate science. I feel less stupid every time I watch these.
Chernobyl melted down due to nuclear power, so I think thunderf00t should heat up his zirconium using a nuclear reactor or by focusing the rays given off by nature's nuclear reactor.
@@kirkhamandy I totally agree, really down to earth guy! We can all hope for a return someday! Edit... copied from his community tab on his channel 1 month ago... Photonicinduction 1 month ago New series coming soon boys!! Update well over due and will be posted soon. Its looking good at last:)
I think a Welder will be your best bet. Although a TIG welder would be ideal since the tungsten electrode will not contaminate anything. A welder with high voltage start function will also help greatly in a confined space. Then, maybe place the Zirconium in a small graphite cruicible or something which you connect to the other terminal of the welder. You can then heat it well above the melting point and drop it by tilting the graphite cruicible. As for induction Heaters: Even for a lot of money, you likely won´t find anything that will do the job. Firstly, most induction heaters are meant to heat steel, which is by far the easiest metal to heat. All non-ferromagnetic metals are MUCH harder to heat. Additionally, heating to high temperatures is even harder for them since the electrical resistance changes with temperature. Your target being very small doesn´t help either. So at least for this purpose, I wouldn´t recommend it.
I was also going to suggest AC TIG with HF/HV start (scratch of lift start is going to be a nightmare to get working, just don't even try). the same tungsten electrodes can be used for the "ground" connection.
High frequency start TIG machine using argon helium mix. The helium transfers the heat better so it will heat up much faster. The key is what do you hold the sample with that will not react but is conductive to allow the current to flow.
The water reacted with the Zircalloy cladding of the fuel rods and other materials in the reactor. The temperature and pressure shot up due to the power surge that destroyed the reactor, and steam oxidized the Zircalloy cladding into hydrogen and zirconium oxide. When the first explosion ruptured the reactor, hydrogen, hot graphite came into contact with oxygen, triggering the second explosion.
I Think the second explosion was steam also. Think of it like this, when the first explosion goes, it ripped apart the assemblies, and the water lines, and leaves a void . Then all the water(already super heated) pools briefly in the still intense heat of the reactor. For a brief time the water and steam is contained under the lid, but as soon as the super heated steam and water forces it's way through the lid, the pressure drops, and all the pooled water in the void flashes to steam instantly. This makes sense as to why the second explosion was bigger, because there was much more water available to flash to steam after the pipes had been ruptured and allowed a reservoir to briefly form in the reactor.
This also sounds plausible. I cannot wait for the results of his experiment... I would love to see your hypothesis put together in an experiment as well. Should be pretty interesting either way
This could also be a possiblity, I read a paper where even somone sugested that the uranium in the reactor got critical mass and there was a mini atom bomb exploision in the reactor. It's a very interessting topic. Lika allways there is sadly no unsinkable ship or bulletproof reactor ...
Would it really happen briefly after the first explosion, I dont think its possible to instantly boil water that way considering the boiling water cools the rest of the water and there would need to be time for all the water to be pumped into the chamber
@Tf00t I have and have experience with an induction heater and mig welder. You are correct that with a larger piece of metal the heater will heat "faster" due to stronger eddy currents, a larger block will heat roughly as fast as a smaller one as the stronger eddy currents are roughly outweighed by the larger piece. I'm not sure as to whether or not this works similarly with zirconium as with iron. Yes the induction heater would be able to heat inside a sealed tube but the smaller the gap between the coil and the metal the faster and hotter it will get. I am unsure as to the extent of power needed to heat a block of zirconium nor of a method of forcing a drop to fall, apart from using a larger block and literally just waiting for enough to melt so as to overcome surface tension, which I can see being rather unhelpful as the drop may begin to oxidise as it forms. I am not sure how the zirconium would react to eddy currents at higher temperatures, whether the increased resistance would make it heat faster or slower. When you said MIG did you mean the one that feeds wire automatically (MIG) or the one where you need to feed the wire manually (TIG) as this will make a big difference, I'm going to assume you said TIG as with a MIG welder it requires the consumed wire to feed and melt to produce an arc whereas with a TIG welder you have more robust electrodes that you would be able to use to melt metal. In terms of a TIG welder if you had two electrodes and some zirconium wire you would be able to feed the wire into the arc created by the welder thus easily creating a droplet, this droplet would likely fall (although a bit erratically). I'm not entirely sure how you could feed the wire into the arc whilst under vacuum or argon, although granted that you used argon you wouldn't need too good a seal and so could have a small hole in the top of the apparatus. Another issue I can see would be the droplet cooling as it fell but this is easily an issue for any plan. I would say your best bet would be to use a TIG welder if you can get one and feed wire into a small hole in an argon filled apparatus, you would also not need nor want such a long drop shaft as with the sodium lithium alloy but I presume you already thought of that. You could try with an induction heater although if it doesn't quite work you would have been set back a nice 1000+ quid, but if you could borrow one that might be a possibility if the welder falls through. I'll reply to this comment with any other thoughts if they arise Best of luck anyhow. Look forward to potential results.
I think he moved to India to live with his wife. He probably lives like a king in her village now if he liquidated his UK assets. What gets you a pokey little terrace in the south of England will get you a mansion and a few acres in India. Everyone important in India speaks English as well. You don't need to speak the local language.
Why don't you drop the water on the Zirconium much easier to move the water then a super heated piece of metal only down side would be how much would be visible.
Good idea! Also, you can use a graphite crucible in the induction heater: the graphite is inductively heated itself, and a piece of Zr in it will melt. One question though: how do you isolate the explosion only due to white hot metal hitting water? It will explode without any additional chemical interaction, so you need a baseline, no? Like perhaps white hot gold?
Wouldn't that ruin the integrity of the surface tention plus you would want to keep as many factors the same as possible like acceleration due to gravity
Light Armanov acceleration due to gravity is of least concern I’d have thought. In Chernobyl the zirconium was in contact with the water already. If you think about the amount of energy you need to put in in the form of heat, a few extra joules of kinetic energy are neither here nor there.
Decades ago, when I was in trade school, my instructor told me of an incident at Hanford. He was a machinist there, operating an engine lathe, turning something out of zirconium. He said they kept a length of 2x10 at the end of the bed, in case the part caught fire so that they could loosen the workpiece and use the board to flip it away. Well, it caught fire, but he wasn't about to put his hands near it with the chuck key, so it sort of fell between the ways, melted the cast iron, and fell through to the floor, where it burned a hole. Nice stuff.
You just need a graphite moderated, water cooled fission reactor with all the safety systems disabled to melt your zirconium. It worked for the Soviets :)
@@srenkoch6127 Only for graphite moderated and water cooled, for voids to alter reactivity requires use of two moderators, at least one of them liquid where the voids form.
This is what I think happened. The fuel rods would be so hot that a layer of steam will insulate them, allowing them to heat up even more. The Zr cladding eventually vaporized into millions of white-hot drops/particles that dispersed into the water, providing heat and nucleation sites for boiling. Rapid violent boiling and steam explosion followed.
@thunderfoot, this sounds plausible, you really might be on to something. I really hope you can get this experiment to work, I cannot wait to see the results!! You just got a new patreon subscriber!
Graham Strouse he need to team up with that doctor turned comic turned prankster. He makes the most detailed plan’s I have ever seen when executing a prank. Together that would be unstoppable.
Graham Strouse - So basically he needs a big tank of water with a piece of zirconium in it surrounded by sharks with frickin' CO2 lasers on their heads.
Think you meant tig welder. What about a tiny crucible inside the apparatus and then flood the apparatus. Perhaps the apparatus could be at low pressure to assist sucking the flood in.
@@PaulFentonBlog It might work though I am not sure the crucible is likely to get so hot that bottom of the water ends up flash boiling on contact and the resulting steam explosion sending the water everywhere but where you want it to end up.
You could make a tiny Archimedes' cup to function as a sort of valve that doesn't let the metal through until it's molten and there's enough molten metal. This would solve your problem of holding the metal somewhere until all of it is molten. Anhydrous sodium hydroxide powder(or any other dehydrating agent) to wick up the water vapour might work. And you might want to keep the distance between the water and the metal to a minimum. At those temperatures, losses due to radiation would be very significant. Would silvering the tube from the outside help?
I use induction heaters quite often. We use them to mount solid carbide cutters into a precision-ground steel tool holder for machining. The device is called a shrinker, though it's actually the opposite action that it performs. A coil slips down around the neck of the toolholder and in seconds the steel expands enough that we can insert (or remove) the carbide end mill. Look up Haimer. There is a display on the machine showing the voltage and amperage. Next time I use it I'll note what it takes. Needless to say, we run it off 480V 3Ph.
I think we need to estimate how much zirconium we had at chernobyl. Since the reactor was so hot wouldn't a metal-water explosion be possible with other more common metals as well (steel for example)?
You can turn the whole thing upside down. If you can't drop melted Zr into the water, just pour the water on a melted Zr. Let a piece of melted Zr stick to one (or both) of the W electrode(s), and then pour the water on it from the top.
There are a few options for melting things at high temperatures. Ultimately what your looking for is a refractory material. A lot of people use fire brick in a variety of arrangements with all sorts of grouts from home mixed to commercial products. A cheap, effective but fragile solution is pyrolyze bread. Cut stale bread into a bowl being careful not to smoosh it in the process, wrap in foil and broil it until thoroughly charred. Turns into a carbon foam that is remarkably good at containing heat. Propane and oxygen should get plenty hot enough, especially when the heat is contained in a refractory, however crude it may be.
It's really common when learning to TIG weld thin sheet to heat a spot to the point it melts and drops out as a drop or drops of molten metal which lends itself to an idea. How about capping your old apparatus with a sheet of Zirconium with the welders return cable attached and with a small off centre hole to stop the pressure build-up of your purge argon below the sheet, then have a TIG torch with a gas lens and a big cup above the sheet, the Tungsten vertical right over the middle with a good pre-flow set to shield the puddle the arc creates. That should give a clean unoxidised drop when the sheet melts through and drops into the water. No complicated support structure for Zirconium pellets or pieces it would be quite quick to set up and test to see if it has the ability to create the drops you want with other cheaper metals in place of the Zirconium
It's doubtful this hypothesis will turn out true: Zirconium is in the titanium family, and very resistant to corrosion (at least once a layer of oxide is formed). It would require very, very special circumstances to create the right environment for a Coulombic explosion, that occurs when sodium gets in contact with water with the right conditions, to happen. But I'm not an expert and could easily be wrong.
>At least once a layer of oxide is formed. This can only really happen when the metal is solid. In a liquid, new material keeps being circulating to the surface.
Yeah, tough one, especially given you don't want to keep heating that stuff as it falls in a similar way it would have been in the reactor. Granted it may not have been increasing temp heated, however, I suspect everything else may have been hot enough to prolong how long the zirconium would have stayed hot enough to be liquefied-ish-molten. The hotter the environment, the lower the temp delta for thermal transfer. and if that comes close to the glass containment, that in itself may be problematic (given deltas between room temp outside the experiment and inside the glass containment). It'll be cool if you figure it out, I got no ideas on how to make that work (safely). I don't think z-pinch approaches that kind of difficulty. Great vid VoT and crew. B)
Is it possible the damage is from a steam implosion when the steam is flashed to vapour? Spraying cold water into steam can create a hell of a vacuum and an implosion would do a lot of damage. It seems as though Zirconium is too far away on the periodic table to produce the electrical effects of sodium. To reach even half those temperatures all the water around would already be steam.
@@muthafukka7733 The two look very similar. Implosions move inward and once they strike a common mid point they rebound outwards. Really the only clue to an implosion, on cursory examination, is the decrease in apparent energy over that of an explosion. The pictures shown would support an implosion hypothesis at least initially.
difficult experiment.. I would try to use fixed TIG welder and movable Zirconium rod, that is grounded. Idea is to melt the zirconium with the arc, and hopefully the drop falls without touching the glass walls. I would also make the shielding gas flow through the apparatus from top to bottom, in order to flush away some water vapor.
if you use graphite electrodes the Zr might not stick to it, you might also be able to setup the electrodes as an arc furnace and suspend a blob of Zr between them until it drips off. With your NaK experiment can you record the reaction on an oscilloscope? if a blob of NaK on the end of something conductive is lowered into water with the oscilloscope probe connected to it and grounded to the water would the different stages of the reaction show on the scope? Also your drawing of the apparatus for the NaK experiment looks suspiciously like a bong.
That´s an interesting idea! I´m not sure if you´d be able to tell much from the readings, but at least there should be something new to measure. Also for the NaK experiments, starting with water that already has different things dissolved in it and maybe at different temperatures would be interesting.
is there enough Zr in the reactor to blow the reactor apart and beyond the roof via Coulomb explosion (assuming that the molten Zr didn't dribble drop by drop into the water but somehow, someway, the whole liquid Zr fell in one big blob into the water) ?
I think the hypothesis is tgat the zirconium is under water, bu it goes coulombic after it reaches 2000 degrees, all at once the lower part of the core. However that would mean you wouldn't get the Elephant's Foot anymore since that's what explodes.
Could I suggest going with the mig welder route, and machining a graphite cathode similar in shape to a test tube, but with a pinhole drilled in the bottom, and an anode that is just a graphite stick lowered into the tube. That way you could use a sufficiently sized zirc sample for better heating.
Turn it around: heat the metal sample, and let it stick to the heating terminals in a blob. Drop the water onto the metal, rather than the other way around. Also, my first thought is why do you need a sample that size? I would think that nearly microscopic would be easier to melt and also not destroy the apparatus. BTW, I've seen solar furnaces -- just a large concave mirror -- get hot enough to melt rock. Some radiant heat source can be spread out and have a reasonable power density, but then you focus it all on a small target.
Hot zirconium as a catalyst and neutrons breaking up water molecules to hydrogen and oxygen were though to be the cause of the explosions at Fukushima, interested in seeing where this goes though.
What can i melt with a few 17-1800C butane torches? I usually use them for welding or lots of other things in my workshop but i’d like to start working cooloer things like glass rocks or metal
Here's an idea. Use the tension of the molten zirconium, get a ceramic tube or something else that wont react to the induction heater, put the zirconium inside and melt, molten zirconium sticks to the inside of the tube until you are ready and use a small jet of argon to push the drop out. The size problem with eddy current will be mitigated due to the fact you can leave the metal in the induction field for as long as you want, and your "go" time can be controlled by the argon jet. The only issue I see is the cooling, you might need to get the temp of the zirconium to a much higher temp than "just" melting.
Tig welder, large argon filled container Water in base, Acryllic windows. Had a piece of kit just like that outside welding shop. In last place I worked. Heavy pit of pipe-fitting. TIG plasma temp ~5,000ºC. No oxygen required. Could have top open to drop molten zirconium in through the stream of argon.
Ahhh, so the original experiment _did_ start out with a bong and a syringe. I kinda figured. Joking aside though, I'm pretty sure that you can decrease the diameter of the target to be heated via induction by simply proportionally increasing the frequency of the current. So you should be able to heat spots on a test tube, plunge a series of very thin tungsten wires through such that they form a rough funnel shape which will cradle the solid zirconium but let it slip through when molten, and hit it with a higher frequency induction heater. Theoretically, of course. Actually, putting a little more thought into this increasing frequency matter, you might actually need microwaves for such a small target. Have you considered trying with a 2000 microwave? I bet you could find one in a scrap yard that just has fried control electronics which could be replaced by a switch on a nice long set of wires. You could probably test it by just plopping it on some, oh wait, 2000C.... Umm, maybe firebrick with a borosilicate bowel on top. Idk, that's my addition to the thought pool. It will be interesting to see when you do nail this one.
Phil. Had a word with the welding guys here (They are some of the best). Their advice a torch with zirconium rod held in a big vice. A TIG flame (4000ºC). Everything clamped in position. Chamber beneath filled with Argon. Tig will pour argon on tip so whole thing could be shielded. Would be simple first stab? Not that difficult, but may not work. We may give it a go.
Ok some ideas/thoughts: 1. Induction heaters might be expensive, but you can try DIYing one, there are tons of videos and circuit schematics online 2. Having a small piece of metal to heat might be problem, not sure. But you may be able to counter by making something like an ICP-AES plasma torch. If you have a slow argon stream going though a high frequency induction heater coil, you can get a self sustaining 3000-5000K plasma discharge going. Plasma is conductive and receptive to inductive heating, which keeps it hot and well ionized. The plasma discharge can be kickstarted with a brief high voltage arc though then argon to get some initial ionization. You could have a long rod of zirconium and lower it into the plasma discharge to melt it and get it to drip. This setup would necessitate some fused silica tubing where the plasma discharge is happening. 3. Tungsten could be used, right? Maybe you could have a tiny tungsten crucible with a hole in the bottom? Tungsten is also conductive, so maybe it can also be used with the sort of high current, welder-based heating you suggested. Tungsten isnt cheap, having it machined is even less so, but you would not need a large part, right? 4. If tungsten is too expensive, how about some high quality graphite? Very heat resistant under argon, conductive and much cheaper. 5. You could try electric self-heating with zirconium only. If you had a Zr rod with thick ends and a thinner midsection, passing a lot of current though would melt the center first, due to having a higher resistance. Maybe you could get some drops out of this?
Here's my thought to save the induction heater. Use a hallow tungsten rod to hold the zirconium until it melts. And a sort of funnel/narrowing on one into so that when it does melt, it just drips. Solar concentrators (lenses) are also an option, but hard to add into an apparatus.
Make it upside-down. Have the zirconium and electrodes at the bottom of the vessel and drop water on it from above. Maybe under vacuum. I am too simple minded to see why it wouldn't work.
Here is a solution... place it in a platinum plate on the bottom of a enclosed test tub. From the top of the test tube, have it enclosed but only have a water pipe ready to add water by turning on a tap and forcing in the water. Place the Zirconium onto the platinum plate at the bottom of the test tube, add the argon gas, heat up the zirconium and when it hits 2000 C.... add the water from above and see how quickly it flash burns or explodes.
What about taking your wire and putting it in a glass vial full of argon, but have the wire come out both ends so you can create a circuit. Put it under pure water and pump your high amperage through it thus liquifying the zirconium inside the vial. (since the wire outside the vial should be cooled it shouldn't fail there). then rigging up a way to break the ampule once the circuit is open?
Can you not just make a cup of wolfram send the current through it with the metal inside. This, presuming that a chemical reaction does not take place, gives you a window of around 1500 degrees and you can just flip the cup when the metal is liquefied. This also perhaps allows you to heat it beyond the meltingpoint.
Use current and the resistance of the zirconium to heat it up. Maybe the leidenfrost effect can prevent heat loss when really hot. Subsequently, if your hypothesis is right, you would have the zeta potential that goes to zero, water-zirconium contact and kaboom. Otherwise, it will keep heating it up, until melts and drops to the bottom without any described destructive explosive reaction. Ciao! Best of luck!
Could you use graphite for any parts that need to be in contact with 2,000+ degree metal and flow the inert gas in through the top to help mitigate the water vapour problem?
I agree with ironhammer. Invert the experiment. Also if you're recreating the conditions, wouldn't oxidization and/or vapor be a variable that was already present?
Is it possible to have leads wrapped around the poles of the Zirconium and suspend the metal near the water in the tube? Amperage could be controlled to temperature required. The glass tube filled with inert gas would eliminate oxidation. When Zirconium is heated, poised just above the water, to desired temperature a controlled immersion could be filmed.
There's a study that concludes a component of the Chernobyl explosion was nuclear. It states: _"According to the main version, it_ [ Chernobyl's explosion ] _was an explosion of chemical character, that is, the explosion of hydrogen formed in the reactor at high temperature as a result of water reaction with zirconium and other elements._ _The alternative version is based on the assumption of a large instant energy release of nuclear energy. Convincing evidence in favor of this version was for the first time obtained by Radium Institute employees on the basis of an analysis of atmospheric xenon radionuclide samples collected in the area of Cherepovetz and of the analysis of the value of 133Xe/133mXe isomers activity ratios._ [...] _it should be acknowledged that the hypothesis of a nuclear mechanism of enormous instant energy yield in the Chernobyl accident seems quite convincing, as is supported by experimental data; these data are in good agreement with the calculated results."_ Google: _Estimation of Explosion Energy Yield at Chernobyl NPP Accident_
The glass would either melt or crack or cool the Zr too much to melt. It would have to be a fused silica vial, at a bare minimum to not shatter under the temperature difference.
Not sure how easy it will be to use a MIG, sounds like you want a good old fashioned AC arc/stick welder transformer to make something akin to a WW2 search light with a couple of carbon rods. For that, 2000 degrees is child's play. Might be worth a trip on ebay to look for an old brazing setup. (I've got one in the garage, but IIRC you're in mainland Europe, and I'm in the UK, and it weighs a bit much to try to lend it to you via DHL!) Having said all that, you might have a MIG that will do old-school, and that's what you were thinking about all along.
I think its totally possible to desighn it in such a way that the metal would drop off using a tig welder, angle the wires down and thin out the zirconium connecting to the wires
induction heaters can be tuned to different frequencies for the various sizes and materials and *depth* of the magnetic penetration. I'm guessing the small sample would require a much higher frequency than a larger piece.
If you do plan to try to drop molten metal into the water, then run the argon stream in reverse. This should significantly reduce the water vapor in the tube. You may need to pump from the current argon inlet to get this to work. You could also pull a vacuum from your current argon inlet. In the vacuum configuration, a check valve could be used to exhaust the potential gas expansion. And by check valve, I mean an unclamped KF flange or similar. Still, I like the submerged TIG welder idea as an initial attempt.
TIG welder, replace tungsten electrode with a zirconium rod with DC Electrode positive, strike arc against a graphite block, use a large gas lens to get good argon coverage, let the zirconium melt and drip into the water. The whole thing can be done under argon either in a glove box or using a fixed set up and letting the high frequency start the high current arc. Look up TIG welder to get an idea about the process. FWIW it is not difficult to melt a 1/8" tungsten electrode using this technique.
I can see it now. Flask with water at the bottom, as depicted although much taller. Inactive gas being pumped from the top and evacuated at the bottom/side to keep out water vapor and air. Pellet dropper drops pellet, which falls first through an inductive heater and then gets hit by a laser before reacting in the chamber which has a highspeed camera pointed at it.
Could you have the heating element just above the water with the zirconium on top, heat to temperature, then mechanically move the element below the water? Maybe not ideal, but you won't need to worry about the zirconium cooling down during the drop or sticking to things or the water absorbing all of the heat you're pumping in?
that small piece of molten metal is probably going to cool down quickly will it have enough time to fall into water, exchange electrons and still be liquid? perhaps doing it in vacuum would help but probably not much while introducing another challenge anyway, is doing it in such a small scale even viable?
since you will be filling the tube with argon anyway, why not use a tig welder (they are cleaner, known for generating less splatter). Perhaps see if you can suspend the tungsten with a wooden clamp (something the tungsten is unlikely to stick to), exposing it to the edge of where the welder's plasma would be
Could you heat a bigger chunk in an induction heater, but in a glass with a restriction so only a small part of the molten mass drips through? Like an hourglass that only lets a tiny drip of the molten mass through?
The resistance of heated metals rises with temperature so you might not be able to melt your sample with an induction heater. If you want gravity to transport your drop, couldn't you use a zirconium wire and heat only the tip of it till it melts into a droplet heavy enough to separate from the rod naturally?
you can't put the apparatus underwater, you'll boil off all your water LONG before you get the zirconium to melt. as for the melted zirconium sticking to the wire, perhaps a coating that zirconium doesn't stick to. my first thought is carbon, this is used when melting precious metals because those metals will not stick to the carbon, not sure if this applies to zirconium though. another option is to use more than a drop, it will stay molten longer. or, you can use something like would be used to smelt iron, so you have a mass of coal, some billows, and your zirconium inside that. the coal acts as a reducing environment so you won't burn your zirconium, and you should be able to get it up to temp to melt the zirconium, when the zirconium melts it will run down into a spicket at the bottom and drip down into the water. for billows you can use a vacuum cleaner set to blow.
use a tig welder.. mig uses the wire to make contact and melt metal including the metal in the wire. tig uses an arc from a sharpened tungsten pen about a mm away from what you want to heat. you would still need to hold up the piece of zirconium and what ever holds it up will be the negative clamp of the welding unit so to speak. the good thing with welding is you need to do it with a argon gas so oxigen is not there, both mig and tig use that. i sometimes use my tig however to just heat up metal rods or similar to the point i can bend it without having spotwelding marks. basicly with the tig you set it low enough to still get the arc going and then crank it up to the setting you need to get it to 2000 degree. think about it.. its easier then a mig setup
For high temperature melting consider "arc furnace". Two graphite/carbon electrodes (for weld removal) powered by stick welder. You already have Ar inside which makes arc easier. Carbon rods at an angle because magnetic Lorentz force will push the arc which also stabilizes the arc so it does not wobble so much in hot swirling gasses. Material for melt just put in the arc, material does not have to be electrically conductive.
Graphite/carbon electrodes have one drawback, the arc plasma contains so much active carbon that metal-carbides immediately crystalize on electrodes. With AC current crystals form equally on both electrodes, for DC current only on one electrode. The DC + electrode runs hotter due to heat transport from the plasma by electrons. So it is more like carbon reactor then a furnace. May be a ceramic shield can separate arc from "test metal".
Hey. Thanks for some of your insights. Do you know of some reputable experiment books for kids? I just would like to get some of my nieces and nephews into mechanics and I am kind of an idiot (barely passed high school). Be well and safe sir.
why not do it the other way ? dropp the water onto the test object. Is there not a way trough vacuum to hold water in a sort of glass wich is upside down ^^ ?
Phil, I have a suggestion to this experiment. Do you think it would be possible to acoustically levitate a droplet size piece of zirconium using a halfsphere array of ultrasonic transducers(device)? This would have a hole so that when you turn off the transducers the drop would fall down through the device into a tube and then the water. When the piece i levitated it could be zapped with the laser and kept "safe" by a stream of argon gas until it has the right temperature. This is all assuming the levitation can hold on to the piece in liquid form etc. Do you think it could work?
@VoiceOfThunder A good idea to use a welder. Welders tend to make hot bouncy metal balls and throw them all over the place for their fun. To make a liquid metal droplet fall you can repel it using magnetic field, the way rail guns do. I might try this out with my power supply and the cut offs of iridium wire. If it will work, then it will for zirconium as well.
Could you have the argon jet suspending the metal over water while its heated by the CO2 laser? Then, once the metal is hot enough you could just cut off the flow of argon suspending the metal and it would fall into the water. Argon is heavier than air so there would still be argon in between the metal and the surface of the water... I know the CO2 laser was the least preferred option but it seems like it would be the best way to avoid the concerns laid out in the welder setup. Just a thought. I love this new channel!
You don't want a MIG welder. You want an arc welder (or a TIG, but really that's the same thing but with a few extra features.). You can get massive arc welders at auction that can do hundreds of amps. I bought one that runs on 240V single-phase with 120A input. It allows you to weld at 540A. It cost me $200. I see similar ones at similar prices all the time on Craigslist and on industrial auctions. Don't get the three-phase models unless you have access to three-phase power in your lab.
What about heating the zirconium up on a plate or some other stable apparatus and then dropping a column of water onto it? Or lowering the entire heating and filming apparatus into the water rather than trying to get a drop lose.
5 dislikes from the zirconium lobby. Backyard Scientist has a nice video in wich he pours molten NaCl into water with a similar explosion. Baffling how fast.
Drop the bit of zirconium down a tube containing hot argon plasma, likely RF generated. If it can't be heated up during the fall, preheat at the top by induction until it drips to a fall and continue heating in the plasma during the fall.
Love the video! With the vapor pressure from water, is there not a way of coating the water with something that doesn't react strongly and then evacuate the tube?
He really drew a bong
@12:00 I was about to leave this comment.
blub blub blub
I'm pretty high at the moment and I thought: Am I the only one seeing this?
Obv in the comments lol
With an induction heated self lighter.
TF is a licensed glassware merchant
*blubblubblubblubblubblubblub*
@@BradHominem I love learning about chemistry high for some reason... makes it make sense
Loved this channel since the first video. Hard cutting science facts and good visuals. Speculation based on legitimate science. I feel less stupid every time I watch these.
"THERE WAS GRAPHITE ON THE GROUND, HBO BUSTED!!!!- thunderFOOOTTT"
Yup. I feel so smart.
It’s not a matter of feeling less stupid rather *less uninformed*
If you are watching videos like this you already are quite intelligent. 😁
My favorite part was when 100 people told him he drew a bong.
Ask ElecroBOOM to make you an induction heater!
Chernobyl melted down due to nuclear power, so I think thunderf00t should heat up his zirconium using a nuclear reactor or by focusing the rays given off by nature's nuclear reactor.
He'll make it explode before it can melt the zirconium
@@kirkhamandy Photonicinduction!! Is he Still living in somerset or has he moved to India?
@@kirkhamandy I totally agree, really down to earth guy! We can all hope for a return someday!
Edit... copied from his community tab on his channel 1 month ago... Photonicinduction
1 month ago
New series coming soon boys!! Update well over due and will be posted soon. Its looking good at last:)
@@timhooper1557 awesome, great channel 😊
I think a Welder will be your best bet. Although a TIG welder would be ideal since the tungsten electrode will not contaminate anything. A welder with high voltage start function will also help greatly in a confined space.
Then, maybe place the Zirconium in a small graphite cruicible or something which you connect to the other terminal of the welder. You can then heat it well above the melting point and drop it by tilting the graphite cruicible.
As for induction Heaters: Even for a lot of money, you likely won´t find anything that will do the job.
Firstly, most induction heaters are meant to heat steel, which is by far the easiest metal to heat. All non-ferromagnetic metals are MUCH harder to heat. Additionally, heating to high temperatures is even harder for them since the electrical resistance changes with temperature. Your target being very small doesn´t help either. So at least for this purpose, I wouldn´t recommend it.
Agree, I would go for a solution with carbon, but there can be some issues with that I'm overlooking
I was also going to suggest AC TIG with HF/HV start (scratch of lift start is going to be a nightmare to get working, just don't even try). the same tungsten electrodes can be used for the "ground" connection.
Induction cookers are optimised for copper and aluminium. So it's probably just a matter of tuning it appropriately.
@@QlueDuPlessis Induction cookers? what do you mean?
Induction stoves can only heat steel if that´s what you mean.
High frequency start TIG machine using argon helium mix. The helium transfers the heat better so it will heat up much faster. The key is what do you hold the sample with that will not react but is conductive to allow the current to flow.
The water reacted with the Zircalloy cladding of the fuel rods and other materials in the reactor. The temperature and pressure shot up due to the power surge that destroyed the reactor, and steam oxidized the Zircalloy cladding into hydrogen and zirconium oxide. When the first explosion ruptured the reactor, hydrogen, hot graphite came into contact with oxygen, triggering the second explosion.
"I have one of those" is the most satisfying sentence to hear a scientist say in the middle of a lecture on Nuclear Reactors. :P
I Think the second explosion was steam also. Think of it like this, when the first explosion goes, it ripped apart the assemblies, and the water lines, and leaves a void . Then all the water(already super heated) pools briefly in the still intense heat of the reactor. For a brief time the water and steam is contained under the lid, but as soon as the super heated steam and water forces it's way through the lid, the pressure drops, and all the pooled water in the void flashes to steam instantly.
This makes sense as to why the second explosion was bigger, because there was much more water available to flash to steam after the pipes had been ruptured and allowed a reservoir to briefly form in the reactor.
This also sounds plausible. I cannot wait for the results of his experiment...
I would love to see your hypothesis put together in an experiment as well.
Should be pretty interesting either way
This could also be a possiblity, I read a paper where even somone sugested that the uranium in the reactor got critical mass and there was a mini atom bomb exploision in the reactor. It's a very interessting topic. Lika allways there is sadly no unsinkable ship or bulletproof reactor ...
It can also be a combination of both.
@@Jylakir There's no way it reached critical mass. Didn't this channel just have a video on that (criticizing the movie)?
Would it really happen briefly after the first explosion, I dont think its possible to instantly boil water that way considering the boiling water cools the rest of the water and there would need to be time for all the water to be pumped into the chamber
@Tf00t I have and have experience with an induction heater and mig welder.
You are correct that with a larger piece of metal the heater will heat "faster" due to stronger eddy currents, a larger block will heat roughly as fast as a smaller one as the stronger eddy currents are roughly outweighed by the larger piece. I'm not sure as to whether or not this works similarly with zirconium as with iron.
Yes the induction heater would be able to heat inside a sealed tube but the smaller the gap between the coil and the metal the faster and hotter it will get. I am unsure as to the extent of power needed to heat a block of zirconium nor of a method of forcing a drop to fall, apart from using a larger block and literally just waiting for enough to melt so as to overcome surface tension, which I can see being rather unhelpful as the drop may begin to oxidise as it forms. I am not sure how the zirconium would react to eddy currents at higher temperatures, whether the increased resistance would make it heat faster or slower.
When you said MIG did you mean the one that feeds wire automatically (MIG) or the one where you need to feed the wire manually (TIG) as this will make a big difference, I'm going to assume you said TIG as with a MIG welder it requires the consumed wire to feed and melt to produce an arc whereas with a TIG welder you have more robust electrodes that you would be able to use to melt metal.
In terms of a TIG welder if you had two electrodes and some zirconium wire you would be able to feed the wire into the arc created by the welder thus easily creating a droplet, this droplet would likely fall (although a bit erratically). I'm not entirely sure how you could feed the wire into the arc whilst under vacuum or argon, although granted that you used argon you wouldn't need too good a seal and so could have a small hole in the top of the apparatus. Another issue I can see would be the droplet cooling as it fell but this is easily an issue for any plan.
I would say your best bet would be to use a TIG welder if you can get one and feed wire into a small hole in an argon filled apparatus, you would also not need nor want such a long drop shaft as with the sodium lithium alloy but I presume you already thought of that. You could try with an induction heater although if it doesn't quite work you would have been set back a nice 1000+ quid, but if you could borrow one that might be a possibility if the welder falls through.
I'll reply to this comment with any other thoughts if they arise
Best of luck anyhow. Look forward to potential results.
2000°C zirconium knife vs RBMK reactor
this seems like a photonicinduction problem
I think he moved to India to live with his wife. He probably lives like a king in her village now if he liquidated his UK assets. What gets you a pokey little terrace in the south of England will get you a mansion and a few acres in India. Everyone important in India speaks English as well. You don't need to speak the local language.
Why don't you drop the water on the Zirconium much easier to move the water then a super heated piece of metal only down side would be how much would be visible.
Good idea!
Also, you can use a graphite crucible in the induction heater: the graphite is inductively heated itself, and a piece of Zr in it will melt.
One question though: how do you isolate the explosion only due to white hot metal hitting water? It will explode without any additional chemical interaction, so you need a baseline, no? Like perhaps white hot gold?
Or keep the Zirconium fixed and raise the flask. It's all relative.
Maybe the water will evaporate before hitting the zirconium. Unless you dump a lot of water on it.
Wouldn't that ruin the integrity of the surface tention plus you would want to keep as many factors the same as possible like acceleration due to gravity
Light Armanov acceleration due to gravity is of least concern I’d have thought. In Chernobyl the zirconium was in contact with the water already. If you think about the amount of energy you need to put in in the form of heat, a few extra joules of kinetic energy are neither here nor there.
Decades ago, when I was in trade school, my instructor told me of an incident at Hanford. He was a machinist there, operating an engine lathe, turning something out of zirconium. He said they kept a length of 2x10 at the end of the bed, in case the part caught fire so that they could loosen the workpiece and use the board to flip it away. Well, it caught fire, but he wasn't about to put his hands near it with the chuck key, so it sort of fell between the ways, melted the cast iron, and fell through to the floor, where it burned a hole. Nice stuff.
You just need a graphite moderated, water cooled fission reactor with all the safety systems disabled to melt your zirconium. It worked for the Soviets :)
With a positive void coefficient.
@@lyrimetacurl0 Well that is usually automatically included in a graphite moderated reactor.....
@@srenkoch6127 Only for graphite moderated and water cooled, for voids to alter reactivity requires use of two moderators, at least one of them liquid where the voids form.
This thread is obviously where the educated commenters hang out.
This is what I think happened. The fuel rods would be so hot that a layer of steam will insulate them, allowing them to heat up even more. The Zr cladding eventually vaporized into millions of white-hot drops/particles that dispersed into the water, providing heat and nucleation sites for boiling. Rapid violent boiling and steam explosion followed.
@thunderfoot, this sounds plausible, you really might be on to something. I really hope you can get this experiment to work, I cannot wait to see the results!!
You just got a new patreon subscriber!
Is it about time Thunderf00t crowdfunds a super-villain scheme of some sort?
Graham Strouse he need to team up with that doctor turned comic turned prankster. He makes the most detailed plan’s I have ever seen when executing a prank. Together that would be unstoppable.
Graham Strouse
- So basically he needs a big tank of water with a piece of zirconium in it surrounded by sharks with frickin' CO2 lasers on their heads.
i'm just so so so happy that youtube has channels with actual content still :)
good work there dude
Think you meant tig welder. What about a tiny crucible inside the apparatus and then flood the apparatus. Perhaps the apparatus could be at low pressure to assist sucking the flood in.
I like this. Wouldn't it be easier to bring the water to the molten zirconium, rather than the other way
around?
@@PaulFentonBlog It might work though I am not sure the crucible is likely to get so hot that bottom of the water ends up flash boiling on contact and the resulting steam explosion sending the water everywhere but where you want it to end up.
You could use two graphite rods as electrodes with your welder setup to prevent sticking. Nice vid, as always!
I like the design for the new bong plz send blueprints to aus. Love you thunder keep it up!
You could make a tiny Archimedes' cup to function as a sort of valve that doesn't let the metal through until it's molten and there's enough molten metal. This would solve your problem of holding the metal somewhere until all of it is molten. Anhydrous sodium hydroxide powder(or any other dehydrating agent) to wick up the water vapour might work. And you might want to keep the distance between the water and the metal to a minimum. At those temperatures, losses due to radiation would be very significant. Would silvering the tube from the outside help?
I use induction heaters quite often. We use them to mount solid carbide cutters into a precision-ground steel tool holder for machining. The device is called a shrinker, though it's actually the opposite action that it performs. A coil slips down around the neck of the toolholder and in seconds the steel expands enough that we can insert (or remove) the carbide end mill. Look up Haimer. There is a display on the machine showing the voltage and amperage. Next time I use it I'll note what it takes. Needless to say, we run it off 480V 3Ph.
Just a question. Do you mind doing a video on what happens during a nuclear melt down. Just out of curisosity :)
Great idea!
I think we need to estimate how much zirconium we had at chernobyl. Since the reactor was so hot wouldn't a metal-water explosion be possible with other more common metals as well (steel for example)?
Molten steel won't react with water chemically like that though.
You're wrong... th-cam.com/video/78CBUcGtfOs/w-d-xo.html
Also: th-cam.com/video/-RYCXDUt2m8/w-d-xo.html
You may consider heating the zirconium using tungsten wire basket / coil intended for vacuum evaporation.
You can turn the whole thing upside down. If you can't drop melted Zr into the water, just pour the water on a melted Zr.
Let a piece of melted Zr stick to one (or both) of the W electrode(s), and then pour the water on it from the top.
That was my first idea as well, but my guess is that it might make the observation more difficult/impossible.
There are a few options for melting things at high temperatures. Ultimately what your looking for is a refractory material. A lot of people use fire brick in a variety of arrangements with all sorts of grouts from home mixed to commercial products. A cheap, effective but fragile solution is pyrolyze bread. Cut stale bread into a bowl being careful not to smoosh it in the process, wrap in foil and broil it until thoroughly charred. Turns into a carbon foam that is remarkably good at containing heat. Propane and oxygen should get plenty hot enough, especially when the heat is contained in a refractory, however crude it may be.
11:54 I appreciate how much it looks like you've just drawn a water bong :D
It's really common when learning to TIG weld thin sheet to heat a spot to the point it melts and drops out as a drop or drops of molten metal which lends itself to an idea.
How about capping your old apparatus with a sheet of Zirconium with the welders return cable attached and with a small off centre hole to stop the pressure build-up of your purge argon below the sheet, then have a TIG torch with a gas lens and a big cup above the sheet, the Tungsten vertical right over the middle with a good pre-flow set to shield the puddle the arc creates. That should give a clean unoxidised drop when the sheet melts through and drops into the water. No complicated support structure for Zirconium pellets or pieces it would be quite quick to set up and test to see if it has the ability to create the drops you want with other cheaper metals in place of the Zirconium
It's doubtful this hypothesis will turn out true: Zirconium is in the titanium family, and very resistant to corrosion (at least once a layer of oxide is formed). It would require very, very special circumstances to create the right environment for a Coulombic explosion, that occurs when sodium gets in contact with water with the right conditions, to happen. But I'm not an expert and could easily be wrong.
>At least once a layer of oxide is formed.
This can only really happen when the metal is solid. In a liquid, new material keeps being circulating to the surface.
"Reactor is just a water heater"
BRUH
And the hypothesis is wrong
Zirkonium exploded? Not great not terrible
Yeah, tough one, especially given you don't want to keep heating that stuff as it falls in a similar way it would have been in the reactor. Granted it may not have been increasing temp heated, however, I suspect everything else may have been hot enough to prolong how long the zirconium would have stayed hot enough to be liquefied-ish-molten. The hotter the environment, the lower the temp delta for thermal transfer. and if that comes close to the glass containment, that in itself may be problematic (given deltas between room temp outside the experiment and inside the glass containment). It'll be cool if you figure it out, I got no ideas on how to make that work (safely). I don't think z-pinch approaches that kind of difficulty.
Great vid VoT and crew. B)
Is it possible the damage is from a steam implosion when the steam is flashed to vapour?
Spraying cold water into steam can create a hell of a vacuum and an implosion would do a lot of damage.
It seems as though Zirconium is too far away on the periodic table to produce the electrical effects of sodium.
To reach even half those temperatures all the water around would already be steam.
Except that it was an explosion, not an implosion
@@muthafukka7733 The two look very similar. Implosions move inward and once they strike a common mid point they rebound outwards. Really the only clue to an implosion, on cursory examination, is the decrease in apparent energy over that of an explosion. The pictures shown would support an implosion hypothesis at least initially.
difficult experiment.. I would try to use fixed TIG welder and movable Zirconium rod, that is grounded. Idea is to melt the zirconium with the arc, and hopefully the drop falls without touching the glass walls. I would also make the shielding gas flow through the apparatus from top to bottom, in order to flush away some water vapor.
if you use graphite electrodes the Zr might not stick to it, you might also be able to setup the electrodes as an arc furnace and suspend a blob of Zr between them until it drips off.
With your NaK experiment can you record the reaction on an oscilloscope? if a blob of NaK on the end of something conductive is lowered into water with the oscilloscope probe connected to it and grounded to the water would the different stages of the reaction show on the scope?
Also your drawing of the apparatus for the NaK experiment looks suspiciously like a bong.
That´s an interesting idea! I´m not sure if you´d be able to tell much from the readings, but at least there should be something new to measure.
Also for the NaK experiments, starting with water that already has different things dissolved in it and maybe at different temperatures would be interesting.
is there enough Zr in the reactor to blow the reactor apart and beyond the roof via Coulomb explosion (assuming that the molten Zr didn't dribble drop by drop into the water but somehow, someway, the whole liquid Zr fell in one big blob into the water) ?
I think the hypothesis is tgat the zirconium is under water, bu it goes coulombic after it reaches 2000 degrees, all at once the lower part of the core. However that would mean you wouldn't get the Elephant's Foot anymore since that's what explodes.
12:00 thought he was drawing a bong and going to say something to the effect of “having to be high to fund this”
Could I suggest going with the mig welder route, and machining a graphite cathode similar in shape to a test tube, but with a pinhole drilled in the bottom, and an anode that is just a graphite stick lowered into the tube. That way you could use a sufficiently sized zirc sample for better heating.
Turn it around: heat the metal sample, and let it stick to the heating terminals in a blob. Drop the water onto the metal, rather than the other way around.
Also, my first thought is why do you need a sample that size? I would think that nearly microscopic would be easier to melt and also not destroy the apparatus.
BTW, I've seen solar furnaces -- just a large concave mirror -- get hot enough to melt rock. Some radiant heat source can be spread out and have a reasonable power density, but then you focus it all on a small target.
Hot zirconium as a catalyst and neutrons breaking up water molecules to hydrogen and oxygen were though to be the cause of the explosions at Fukushima, interested in seeing where this goes though.
What can i melt with a few 17-1800C butane torches? I usually use them for welding or lots of other things in my workshop but i’d like to start working cooloer things like glass rocks or metal
Here's an idea. Use the tension of the molten zirconium, get a ceramic tube or something else that wont react to the induction heater, put the zirconium inside and melt, molten zirconium sticks to the inside of the tube until you are ready and use a small jet of argon to push the drop out. The size problem with eddy current will be mitigated due to the fact you can leave the metal in the induction field for as long as you want, and your "go" time can be controlled by the argon jet. The only issue I see is the cooling, you might need to get the temp of the zirconium to a much higher temp than "just" melting.
Tig welder, large argon filled container Water in base, Acryllic windows. Had a piece of kit just like that outside welding shop. In last place I worked. Heavy pit of pipe-fitting. TIG plasma temp ~5,000ºC. No oxygen required. Could have top open to drop molten zirconium in through the stream of argon.
To avoid the water cooling it too much, can you do it in a stream of superheated steam?
Ahhh, so the original experiment _did_ start out with a bong and a syringe. I kinda figured.
Joking aside though, I'm pretty sure that you can decrease the diameter of the target to be heated via induction by simply proportionally increasing the frequency of the current. So you should be able to heat spots on a test tube, plunge a series of very thin tungsten wires through such that they form a rough funnel shape which will cradle the solid zirconium but let it slip through when molten, and hit it with a higher frequency induction heater. Theoretically, of course.
Actually, putting a little more thought into this increasing frequency matter, you might actually need microwaves for such a small target. Have you considered trying with a 2000 microwave? I bet you could find one in a scrap yard that just has fried control electronics which could be replaced by a switch on a nice long set of wires. You could probably test it by just plopping it on some, oh wait, 2000C.... Umm, maybe firebrick with a borosilicate bowel on top. Idk, that's my addition to the thought pool. It will be interesting to see when you do nail this one.
Phil. Had a word with the welding guys here (They are some of the best). Their advice a torch with zirconium rod held in a big vice. A TIG flame (4000ºC). Everything clamped in position. Chamber beneath filled with Argon. Tig will pour argon on tip so whole thing could be shielded. Would be simple first stab? Not that difficult, but may not work. We may give it a go.
Ok some ideas/thoughts:
1. Induction heaters might be expensive, but you can try DIYing one, there are tons of videos and circuit schematics online
2. Having a small piece of metal to heat might be problem, not sure. But you may be able to counter by making something like an ICP-AES plasma torch. If you have a slow argon stream going though a high frequency induction heater coil, you can get a self sustaining 3000-5000K plasma discharge going. Plasma is conductive and receptive to inductive heating, which keeps it hot and well ionized. The plasma discharge can be kickstarted with a brief high voltage arc though then argon to get some initial ionization.
You could have a long rod of zirconium and lower it into the plasma discharge to melt it and get it to drip. This setup would necessitate some fused silica tubing where the plasma discharge is happening.
3. Tungsten could be used, right? Maybe you could have a tiny tungsten crucible with a hole in the bottom? Tungsten is also conductive, so maybe it can also be used with the sort of high current, welder-based heating you suggested. Tungsten isnt cheap, having it machined is even less so, but you would not need a large part, right?
4. If tungsten is too expensive, how about some high quality graphite? Very heat resistant under argon, conductive and much cheaper.
5. You could try electric self-heating with zirconium only. If you had a Zr rod with thick ends and a thinner midsection, passing a lot of current though would melt the center first, due to having a higher resistance. Maybe you could get some drops out of this?
Here's my thought to save the induction heater. Use a hallow tungsten rod to hold the zirconium until it melts. And a sort of funnel/narrowing on one into so that when it does melt, it just drips.
Solar concentrators (lenses) are also an option, but hard to add into an apparatus.
Make it upside-down. Have the zirconium and electrodes at the bottom of the vessel and drop water on it from above. Maybe under vacuum.
I am too simple minded to see why it wouldn't work.
Ya same
But im just a stupid technologist
Here is a solution... place it in a platinum plate on the bottom of a enclosed test tub.
From the top of the test tube, have it enclosed but only have a water pipe ready to add water by turning on a tap and forcing in the water.
Place the Zirconium onto the platinum plate at the bottom of the test tube, add the argon gas, heat up the zirconium and when it hits 2000 C.... add the water from above and see how quickly it flash burns or explodes.
What about taking your wire and putting it in a glass vial full of argon, but have the wire come out both ends so you can create a circuit. Put it under pure water and pump your high amperage through it thus liquifying the zirconium inside the vial. (since the wire outside the vial should be cooled it shouldn't fail there). then rigging up a way to break the ampule once the circuit is open?
wouldn't the current from the mig drag the metel to the side of the tube?
If it does explode, what is your safety setup like?
Would an induction heater even work effectively for zirconium? How ferromagnetic is it?
Can you not just make a cup of wolfram send the current through it with the metal inside. This, presuming that a chemical reaction does not take place, gives you a window of around 1500 degrees and you can just flip the cup when the metal is liquefied. This also perhaps allows you to heat it beyond the meltingpoint.
Use current and the resistance of the zirconium to heat it up. Maybe the leidenfrost effect can prevent heat loss when really hot. Subsequently, if your hypothesis is right, you would have the zeta potential that goes to zero, water-zirconium contact and kaboom. Otherwise, it will keep heating it up, until melts and drops to the bottom without any described destructive explosive reaction. Ciao! Best of luck!
Wow. Sleuthing Chernobyl. You have a hungry mind. I'm glad.
Could you use graphite for any parts that need to be in contact with 2,000+ degree metal and flow the inert gas in through the top to help mitigate the water vapour problem?
I agree with ironhammer. Invert the experiment. Also if you're recreating the conditions, wouldn't oxidization and/or vapor be a variable that was already present?
Good point.
Is it possible to have leads wrapped around the poles of the Zirconium and suspend the metal near the water in the tube? Amperage could be controlled to temperature required. The glass tube filled with inert gas would eliminate oxidation. When Zirconium is heated, poised just above the water, to desired temperature a controlled immersion could be filmed.
There's a study that concludes a component of the Chernobyl explosion was nuclear. It states:
_"According to the main version, it_ [ Chernobyl's explosion ] _was an explosion of chemical character, that is, the explosion of hydrogen formed in the reactor at high temperature as a result of water reaction with zirconium and other elements._
_The alternative version is based on the assumption of a large instant energy release of nuclear energy. Convincing evidence in favor of this version was for the first time obtained by Radium Institute employees on the basis of an analysis of atmospheric xenon radionuclide samples collected in the area of Cherepovetz and of the analysis of the value of 133Xe/133mXe isomers activity ratios._ [...] _it should be acknowledged that the hypothesis of a nuclear mechanism of enormous instant energy yield in the Chernobyl accident seems quite convincing, as is supported by experimental data; these data are in good agreement with the calculated results."_
Google: _Estimation of Explosion Energy Yield at Chernobyl NPP Accident_
Xenon-isomer ratios aren't speculation. They're used to detect nuclear explosions.
How about this?
Zirconium in a sealed vial under water
Heat via induction under water
Mechanically crack the vial
The glass would either melt or crack or cool the Zr too much to melt. It would have to be a fused silica vial, at a bare minimum to not shatter under the temperature difference.
Not sure how easy it will be to use a MIG, sounds like you want a good old fashioned AC arc/stick welder transformer to make something akin to a WW2 search light with a couple of carbon rods. For that, 2000 degrees is child's play.
Might be worth a trip on ebay to look for an old brazing setup.
(I've got one in the garage, but IIRC you're in mainland Europe, and I'm in the UK, and it weighs a bit much to try to lend it to you via DHL!)
Having said all that, you might have a MIG that will do old-school, and that's what you were thinking about all along.
I think its totally possible to desighn it in such a way that the metal would drop off using a tig welder, angle the wires down and thin out the zirconium connecting to the wires
induction heaters can be tuned to different frequencies for the various sizes and materials and *depth* of the magnetic penetration. I'm guessing the small sample would require a much higher frequency than a larger piece.
a 500 watt induction heater would easily heat your target to over 2000 in just minutes
*Cool you made a video answering my question* !!!!!!!!!!!
Maybe drop it through an induction coil after preheating it with he welder at the top
Kasper maybe he could heat it in an iridium crucible with the welder the melting point of iridium is a few hundred degrees more then zirconium
If you do plan to try to drop molten metal into the water, then run the argon stream in reverse. This should significantly reduce the water vapor in the tube. You may need to pump from the current argon inlet to get this to work.
You could also pull a vacuum from your current argon inlet. In the vacuum configuration, a check valve could be used to exhaust the potential gas expansion. And by check valve, I mean an unclamped KF flange or similar.
Still, I like the submerged TIG welder idea as an initial attempt.
TIG welder, replace tungsten electrode with a zirconium rod with DC Electrode positive, strike arc against a graphite block, use a large gas lens to get good argon coverage, let the zirconium melt and drip into the water. The whole thing can be done under argon either in a glove box or using a fixed set up and letting the high frequency start the high current arc. Look up TIG welder to get an idea about the process. FWIW it is not difficult to melt a 1/8" tungsten electrode using this technique.
I can see it now. Flask with water at the bottom, as depicted although much taller. Inactive gas being pumped from the top and evacuated at the bottom/side to keep out water vapor and air. Pellet dropper drops pellet, which falls first through an inductive heater and then gets hit by a laser before reacting in the chamber which has a highspeed camera pointed at it.
does the sodium/potassium explosion happen with ice the same as with water?
Will the metal continue to heat up as it falls thru the coil? If so let it go before it turns liquid?
Could you have the heating element just above the water with the zirconium on top, heat to temperature, then mechanically move the element below the water?
Maybe not ideal, but you won't need to worry about the zirconium cooling down during the drop or sticking to things or the water absorbing all of the heat you're pumping in?
Could you use a tungsten coil as a resistance and heat a zinc wire in it so when the drops forms it falls down to water?
that small piece of molten metal is probably going to cool down quickly
will it have enough time to fall into water, exchange electrons and still be liquid? perhaps doing it in vacuum would help but probably not much while introducing another challenge
anyway, is doing it in such a small scale even viable?
Could you preheat it with an induction heater then hit it with the mig welder in water?
since you will be filling the tube with argon anyway, why not use a tig welder (they are cleaner, known for generating less splatter). Perhaps see if you can suspend the tungsten with a wooden clamp (something the tungsten is unlikely to stick to), exposing it to the edge of where the welder's plasma would be
Could you drop it through an induction heater, in might not need to pack as much of a punch if the metal is premelted?
Could you heat a bigger chunk in an induction heater, but in a glass with a restriction so only a small part of the molten mass drips through? Like an hourglass that only lets a tiny drip of the molten mass through?
The resistance of heated metals rises with temperature so you might not be able to melt your sample with an induction heater.
If you want gravity to transport your drop, couldn't you use a zirconium wire and heat only the tip of it till it melts into a droplet heavy enough to separate from the rod naturally?
What if you used a stream of argon to hold up your droplet for the laser and cut off the flow right as you zap it?
Simple. Buy a PLASMA CUTTER...20,000 C!
Seen these in action! Agree with it, fast way to melt anything.
Oxygen will react... Can you run plasma cutter on argon?
Can't you spray the water onto the zirkonium when it's molten somehow?
you can't put the apparatus underwater, you'll boil off all your water LONG before you get the zirconium to melt.
as for the melted zirconium sticking to the wire, perhaps a coating that zirconium doesn't stick to. my first thought is carbon, this is used when melting precious metals because those metals will not stick to the carbon, not sure if this applies to zirconium though.
another option is to use more than a drop, it will stay molten longer.
or, you can use something like would be used to smelt iron, so you have a mass of coal, some billows, and your zirconium inside that. the coal acts as a reducing environment so you won't burn your zirconium, and you should be able to get it up to temp to melt the zirconium, when the zirconium melts it will run down into a spicket at the bottom and drip down into the water.
for billows you can use a vacuum cleaner set to blow.
@Thunderfoot, cant you reverse it? heat it at the bottom, when it melt, release the water with some sealed mechanism in the glass bottle.
use a tig welder.. mig uses the wire to make contact and melt metal including the metal in the wire. tig uses an arc from a sharpened tungsten pen about a mm away from what you want to heat.
you would still need to hold up the piece of zirconium and what ever holds it up will be the negative clamp of the welding unit so to speak.
the good thing with welding is you need to do it with a argon gas so oxigen is not there, both mig and tig use that.
i sometimes use my tig however to just heat up metal rods or similar to the point i can bend it without having spotwelding marks.
basicly with the tig you set it low enough to still get the arc going and then crank it up to the setting you need to get it to 2000 degree.
think about it.. its easier then a mig setup
For high temperature melting consider "arc furnace". Two graphite/carbon electrodes (for weld removal) powered by stick welder. You already have Ar inside which makes arc easier. Carbon rods at an angle because magnetic Lorentz force will push the arc which also stabilizes the arc so it does not wobble so much in hot swirling gasses. Material for melt just put in the arc, material does not have to be electrically conductive.
Graphite/carbon electrodes have one drawback, the arc plasma contains so much active carbon that metal-carbides immediately crystalize on electrodes. With AC current crystals form equally on both electrodes, for DC current only on one electrode. The DC + electrode runs hotter due to heat transport from the plasma by electrons. So it is more like carbon reactor then a furnace. May be a ceramic shield can separate arc from "test metal".
Hey. Thanks for some of your insights. Do you know of some reputable experiment books for kids? I just would like to get some of my nieces and nephews into mechanics and I am kind of an idiot (barely passed high school).
Be well and safe sir.
why not do it the other way ? dropp the water onto the test object. Is there not a way trough vacuum to hold water in a sort of glass wich is upside down ^^ ?
Phil, I have a suggestion to this experiment. Do you think it would be possible to acoustically levitate a droplet size piece of zirconium using a halfsphere array of ultrasonic transducers(device)? This would have a hole so that when you turn off the transducers the drop would fall down through the device into a tube and then the water. When the piece i levitated it could be zapped with the laser and kept "safe" by a stream of argon gas until it has the right temperature. This is all assuming the levitation can hold on to the piece in liquid form etc. Do you think it could work?
@VoiceOfThunder A good idea to use a welder. Welders tend to make hot bouncy metal balls and throw them all over the place for their fun. To make a liquid metal droplet fall you can repel it using magnetic field, the way rail guns do. I might try this out with my power supply and the cut offs of iridium wire. If it will work, then it will for zirconium as well.
Could you have the argon jet suspending the metal over water while its heated by the CO2 laser? Then, once the metal is hot enough you could just cut off the flow of argon suspending the metal and it would fall into the water. Argon is heavier than air so there would still be argon in between the metal and the surface of the water... I know the CO2 laser was the least preferred option but it seems like it would be the best way to avoid the concerns laid out in the welder setup. Just a thought. I love this new channel!
You don't want a MIG welder. You want an arc welder (or a TIG, but really that's the same thing but with a few extra features.). You can get massive arc welders at auction that can do hundreds of amps. I bought one that runs on 240V single-phase with 120A input. It allows you to weld at 540A. It cost me $200. I see similar ones at similar prices all the time on Craigslist and on industrial auctions. Don't get the three-phase models unless you have access to three-phase power in your lab.
What about heating the zirconium up on a plate or some other stable apparatus and then dropping a column of water onto it? Or lowering the entire heating and filming apparatus into the water rather than trying to get a drop lose.
THAT'S IT! Finally an idea to stop backsplash while on the toilet: lower the water as the turd comes down to ease it into the water. Fucking finally!
I heard the readings after the explosion was just 3.6 roentgen. They say its the equivalent of a chest x-ray according to sources.
@Kasper Suomalainen USSR Academy of sciences
5 dislikes from the zirconium lobby.
Backyard Scientist has a nice video in wich he pours molten NaCl into water with a similar explosion. Baffling how fast.
Thunderfoot is not a backyard scientist. He works a at academy of sciences and publishes in peer-reviewed periodicals.
@@EK-gr9gd oh no, I mean another TH-cam going by the name of Backyard Scientist.
Thunderf00d draws a zirconium bong
I think this comment was better than the one tjat got all of the likes. Thumbs up guy
Drop the bit of zirconium down a tube containing hot argon plasma, likely RF generated.
If it can't be heated up during the fall, preheat at the top by induction until it drips to a fall and continue heating in the plasma during the fall.
Love the video! With the vapor pressure from water, is there not a way of coating the water with something that doesn't react strongly and then evacuate the tube?