Lighting metal fires (and putting them out??)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 พ.ค. 2024
- Class D reactive metal fires easily light as powders, so how hard is it to set bulk metals on fire?? Subreddit: / explosionsandfire
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Ask any machinist: "What's the best way to start a titanium fire?" and they will tell you all you need to do is mill or turn it dry.
Came here to say this! Dull tools with oil as a coolant can make a VERY EXCITING titanium fire. It's the reason some CNC machines have built in fire suppression!
Yeah, having the titanium in fine chips would probably help.
In a mill the shavings catch fire, right?
@@volvo09 It's a paradox in my opinion. The heat stays with the workpiece but the chips fly off cool. That leads to the dulling of your tools and a good environment for a spark shower you will never want to repeat.
Lathe hack: keep chip tray full of Ti shavings at all times. You don't want to miss a party just because you had to switch to hard-turning some bearing steel...
Welder here was considering starting it with an arc but definitely had some sparky mishaps with the lathe as well so that would make perfect sense.
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bro had this lined up and ready to go
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I served 6 years in the US Navy and when I got to the USS Stennis, we had an entire safety course on class D fires. The answer was always push the aircraft overboard.
because of the salt water or because they just wanted to move the problem away from the ship?
@@XSpamDragonXcause catching the aircraft carrier, or other planes, on fire is bad.
No one gives a shit about a really angry fire falling towards the ocean floor
@@XSpamDragonX Burning thing on ship dangerous. Burning thing in water means no longer burning thing so not dangerous.
Id love to see a video of a fighter jet being scuttled off a carrier 😂
@@XSpamDragonX I mean, the salt and relative lack of oxygen in the ocean would certainly put the fire out but I think they would push the class D fire away because they wouldn't have enough fire extinguishers for the amount of metal they would have to put out, Aircrafts weigh tons.
11:34 Notice that Tom is wearing what appears to be darkened goggles. This is because magnesium fires put out so much UV light that they can singe unprotected eyeballs and cause a condition known as "arc eye", and after long-term exposure, cataracts.
Congratulations on getting slightly closer to completing the thesis since last time !!
bold of you to assume that
@@ExplosionsAndFire This video will be in the supplemental material :)
Check out Cold ones
This brings back memories. When I was a kid I obtained a stack of dead chainsaws. Many chainsaws use magnesium alloy castings. I also had a big ass kerosene burner. I can confirm magnesium alloy burns quite well, especially when water is added. The mysterious white light that lit up the neighbourhood late one night was of course nothing to do with me.
I love the idea of a "kid" obtaining a stack of chainsaws.
@@asteroiderer When given a stack of chainsaws all people become kids again.
@@asteroiderer They were unrepairable. A few years out in the weather does a lot of damage. I had a reputation for taking things apart and my parents thought I couldn't really do much harm with them. Oddly enough I still have a reputation for taking things apart though these days they usually work when I put them back together again.
So are the brake housings for the b52
Your anecdote is the difference between real kids and fictional tinkerers, it's great. In a young adult movie, the main character would have taken all those chainsaws apart and built them into a robot companion or some other complex invention.
Some kids in a club at my high school were trying to ignite aluminum foil on fire with batteries in the hallway, so the teacher (who was a chemistry teacher) thought it was a good idea to give them a few matches and some strips of magnesium metal to ignite outside as an alternative instead. It did not go well.
lawsuit speedrun any%
An acquaintance who worked in a foundry and had access to various metals (don't ask what he did with sticks of sodium) once threw a bat of magnesium on a roaring indoor coal fire. Most people retreated when it caught fire, but one guy who was sat sideways on to the fire stubbornly stayed in his chair, insisting it was fine, and that he could handle it (there may have been alcohol involved all round).
The next morning, the stubborn guy came down to breakfast with one side of his face looking like it was sunburned.
Based chemistry teacher
The teacher was just teaching the wonders of magnesium. And also why learning chemistry is important.
What happened?
I love how the best we have for Class D fires is literally just really dry popcorn salt.
It also has other chemicals added to make it flow more easily. I think the reason its so expensive is that when you need to use them, they have to work or things will get a lot worse very quickly therefore the extinguishers have to be perfect. Another thing is that the companies that make them probably have a lot of liability risk due to the critical nature of their devices and the fact that a cowardly employee or owner of a business might just lie and say the extinguisher didn't work; a lie that would be easy to get away with since metal fires are very hot and destroy the evidence.
All the ones I've ever come across are copper based. Copper agent is probably the best of the three types, also the most expensive. It can stick to objects, absorbs a ton of heat (think heat sinks in electronics), and is really good at lithium fires. It won't blow away either. Uses Argon gas as propellant. Nitrogen reacts with lithium. Copper models are simply copper, while the other NaCl and Graphite models contain a few other ingredients, some of them being carcinogenic. Copper is very toxic to aquatic organisms though.
@@davecSFDThat's really cool! 😁👍🏻
@@ryelor123Smart cookie! 😉👉🏻👉🏻
🧠
@@davecSFDI was about to say the ones I've seen were copper. They plate the fire; it's neat to see. (other than a stupendously expensive thing being on fire.)
When I was a teenager we bought some bootleg unmarked fireworks that must have been filled with Magnesium powder or something. We lit it, ran away, and then were all instantly blinded by this horrific white light because it was nighttime, and I distinctly remember seeing shadows on our neighbors house across the field that was like 300 feet away. When it burned out it had left a divot in the 1/4" steel plate we'd set it on, truly terrifying
That's not terrifying, that's awesome!
You got me thinking of the shadows from hiroshima
I think I had those too. They were only an inch round cap thing so I didn't expect much. That thing was the brightest light I had ever seen, it lit up the area like it was daytime. Way brighter than an arc welder. It was indeed awesome. I went to buy some the next year and could never find them again.
Iron oxide from grandmas cutlery isn’t weird…..
I used to steal magnesium out of my school's storage and make flashbangs... (Well it was more of a flashburn than a flashbang) I really wish I could work there.
Oxy acetylene torch is my go to for burning Metal. A stick welder might do it.
Yeah that seems like a really good suggestion a lot of people want to see tried
@@ExplosionsAndFire And if oxy acetylene fails, (if you can get your hands onto it) oxy dicyanoacetylene. That stuff produces a whopping 4990C flame. Still not enough? Burn that stuff with ozone, 5730C, the hottest flame known.
@@ExplosionsAndFire Or How about a Hydrogen torch? 2800°C baby
@@kiliwami4086 oxy acetylene is available at just about every welding/air supply shop around. Can even grab it at most outdoors store.
And- it goes a lot hotter then hydrogen. Hydrogen does have the advantage of burning very clean, which is why it is used for working with jewelry.
you didn't inhale that zinc did you?
This is some advanced level procrastination. I’m impressed.
Doesn’t he have a thesis due or something lol
A cadmium fire sounds like a full on nightmare
Best way to ignite bulk titanium: find a friend with an acetylene or oxyhydrogen torch and go nuts on it!
In a ceramic pot?
Alternatively, Thermal Lance?
Tune it to zn oxygen rich mixture
That would probably do it. I'd also be very curious to see if it could be ignited using a large capacitor bank, but that would have a whole other set of dangers. Maybe a cool crossover with somebody who has the equipment?
Well, all Titanium fires I have heard of, involve a lathe or a mill in some way. I think this has to do with the fresh, not oxidised surfaces of freshly cut titanium and the thin cross section of the chips.
SLM printers with ultra fine magnesium powder can be quite explosive
i particularly enjoy the budget floodfilling on the periodic table at 1:12
I work in fire protection and do work for some of the biggest chemical production facilities in the world and honestly all of those elements (besides the silly made up group) are a real hazard for everyone on these sites from a day to day. One facility i go to has around 9 fires a month due to the nature of production. Kinda crazy to be around all that shit all the time. Also the silica in fire extinguishers is under investigation for a ban because of the potential "long term effects on your health similar to asbestos"
"You legally cant correct me on it"
Ask War Thunder players how much they care about that.
Winning online argument > being disappeared for treason and espionage
This is the best chemistry channel on TH-cam, not for consistent uploads, not the generally good chemistry but just for comedic value. It's always a fun time watching these.
The only chemistry channel where i truly insta-watch the upload
I think NileRed has a pretty cool attitude as well, but Tom def has a second career as a comedian if his thesis gets to be too much
Everyone knows the most important rule of chemistry is be funny
Australians are unnaturally funny and we love them for it
i truly watch his videos even if i'm not interested in the topic
I've been a fire warden (on and off) for around 30 of the last 45 years of my working life and like you, have never seen a metal fire or what it is that you use to put one out. Well done on demonstrating and explaining this.
BTW, I have worked on a chemical site where we had enormous tanks of Ethylene Oxide and one trick the site's fire brigade used to do on the course they ran was to have an oil tray (a tray around 3m deep but the size of a door laying down) and put some EO in it then set fire to it. Then, they would get one of us lab-rats to put it out using a foam extinguisher and it would appear to go our. After talking to us about it for a minute or two, he would get a long metal rod and push the foam to one side and flames would appear - was not pyrophoric, it just carried on burning in its own atmosphere. The foam had done nothing more than shelter it from the wind. Good luck with completing your thesis - making videos is a substitute activity that benefits the rest of mankind.
I have seen one class D fire it was a wheel on a naval aircraft….the COD/OOD said “push it over” so we pushed the aircraft over the deck into the ocean so we did
Love hearing stories from the old-timers! 😁👍🏻
@@jessewilson8676what type of plane?
My favorite thing about your videos, other than the goober host of them, is the music.
Also I love the really bizarre, tatterdemalion, and derelict furniture. And like, normally, it would languish and rust away in the shed.
But you give it new life. You give that furniture, that fan, that chalk board it's 5 minutes of fame, to where hundreds of thousands of people all over the world can appreciate it.
Furthermore. I think grandma would be honored that you have done the same with the cutlery that her husband probably had to smuggle across some border inside of a taxidermied ferret or something for their future family to enjoy and be able to eat food with it and inherit some day. I'd say you gave it new life, but... I mean you gave it a viking funeral of sorts. That's gotta be similar. RIP Gramma's spoons. Thank you.
🥄🔥🧯
That always reminds me; we had a guy in the lab destroying some old reagents and he ended up with a bag of sodium aluminium hydride powder. Which he wanted to work up by dropping it in water. It reacted so violently a droplet of water jumped up and landed in the bag of reagent setting the whole bag on fire. Managed to manoeuvre the container into the sink; which it proceeded to melt through before finally going out.
Metal hydrides are slightly terrifying.
Ludicrous story?
Poster's name checks out...
🤣 I'll take your word for it only being "slightly" terrifying heh
_[edit: preemptive clarification... I believe the story, I'm just implying it's crazy... like "horse steaks" lol (which are apparently better than beef, but I'll take their word for it!)]
when I worked with Lithium Aluminum Hydride, we kept the main container under inert atmosphere, and never took out more of it than we could comfortably extinguish with Bertha (a big bucket of sand that we dessicated the hell out of with Phosphorus Pentoxide - damp sand just doesn't cut it); it sometimes ignites of its own volition due to moisture in the air, to the extent that some people call it pyrophoric. metal hydrides have also been proposed as a non-cryogenic way to store hydrogen, including for solid-state rockets :)
@@DUKE_of_RAMBLE horse steaks are _divine_ . Beef ain't anywhere close.
@@jacefairis1289 Man you scientist guys are rock stars. Im just sitting here on my lunch break between fixing peoples computers trying to remember funny words from yr 11 chemistry 😂
Speaking of beryllium bricks, I worked at Culham labs for a while and the big fusion doughnut actually has beryllium bricks, I got a beryllium release leaflet when I started work there. IIRC tiny particles of beryllium just kinda float off while the aggressively hot fusion plasma exists which produces a particularly mobile and nasty beryllium exposure hazard especially if something were to go pop, from what I gather from someone who worked in waste handling there the beryllium handling and working waste sits around in barrels on-site for a very long time before they can find a permanent home for it.
Berylliosis is a much cooler disease than lame garden variety silicosis anyway
Yeah absolutely wild how toxic Be is to humans. It’s like nuclear waste except it never decays and will be dangerous to life for forever lol. Wonder what they do with it
@@ExplosionsAndFire straight into the atmosphere, god bless
@@gluesniffingdude JUST LIKE GOD FUCKING INTENDED.
Berylliosis is absolutely no joke. I know someone who once worked with the guys who make beryllium copper non-sparking tools, and working in a beryllium foundry is just a hilarious hedge maze of MSDS sheets and safety inspections.
@@ExplosionsAndFire Beryllium waste is used in the construction of hazardous material signage.
I have been having a dark few days mental health wise and this topic and your video lighted my morning up! Thank you!
Because of this video I told my boss about metal fires (she's a pharmacist) and now I have to become a fire protection assistant and have to do eight more hours of this on a saturday. But I'm also kind of looking forward to it so thanks Tom
Very cool to hear and see how class d extinguishers work!
And that outro, "if you've been made to watch this video as part of your job training, consider asking for more hazard pay" lmao😂
Your episode with coldones was so unexpected but perfectly fit.
Their personalities worked really well together in that episode
Thanks mate!! Glad it turned out so well. It was a lot of fun to film
holy shit, didnt realize it dropped today. I was amazed to hear the teaser on the patreon last week.
"who picks you up and slaps you all around idiot freinds"
I'm watching that next 🤣👍
The slo-mo of spraying water on it was awesome! The drops of water appear to instantly turn into drops of fire!
Would've liked to see a fine mist of water, also.
Hey Tom, your failure to ignite the Titanium and the Magnesium with Thermite and Thermate probably had something to do with the plates dissipating the heat enough to not reach their autoignition temperature. Three solutions I would suggest are,
1. Use more Thermite/Thermate
2. Use a more aggressive fuel/oxidizer mix (My two cents is swapping out Iron Oxide for Ammonia Perchlorate and swapping out the powdered aluminum for powdered magnesium)
3. Reduce the mass of the bulk material you're trying to ignite
With enough electric current, I bet it would be easy peasy.
Also with your #3, increasing the surface area could help. Ive burn a magnesium block before, couldn't get it lit with a propane torch until I scribed it.
most problems can be solved through the addition of sufficient AP lol
In my aircraft fabricator job we used to collect titanium chips from all the precision rivets that we messed up and had to drill out, then light them on fire outside of the building during lunch break. Great deal of fun, surprised that the building never caught on fire
You will get it next time!
Keep trying bro you can do it, determination and perseverance is all you need!
Bro my friend told me something similar I guess burning random crap can cure boredom in the military
Can’t be good to breath that shit in every day. Did you have a spitfire type fan post up on one side?
As a volunteer firefighter one of my favorite things on car fires is seeing the Magnesium glowing as you're walking up to it and then hitting it with water and having it do it's best impression of a professional fireworks show only a few feet away from you're face
Titanium gets covered with a thin oxide layer very quickly, the oxide layer prevents it from igniting.
So you can try to heat it up and grind the oxide layer off the glowing titanium, I'm pretty sure that will start the reaction. If that doesnt work, qou can just ignite some freshly milled titanium shavings, the fine shavings can be heated quick enough to ignite them before the oxide layer gets too thick.
Ignition is nothing more than rapid formation of oxides.
@@Livi_Noelle yes of course, but if the oxides form slowly at room temperature, they form a dense layer which protects the metal from further oxidation and if the oxides form extremely rapid while burning they form a very fine powder, most of that powder is released into the air in form of smoke.
You need to increase your surface area for the fire to reach the Titanium. Metal dust, like any good flammable dust, is great at setting fires.
That's the only thing I can think. A plate of titanium just distributes the heat too well. You need shavings or dust to really get something like that to ignite.
The whole point of the video was that he wants to burn the bulk metal, not the dust
a hydrogen torch might get hot enough? you can make em with an electrolysis generator
@@JackdotC Yes, he wants to burn the bulk metal. So think of the bulk metal as logs, while the shavings and dust are tinder and kindling. Same principle applies.
@@JackdotC maybe dusts or shavings of finer and finer grades stacked above a metal plate?
What will come first ? The robot apocalypse or you finishing your PhD ?
I like to think I’ll finish a day before the robot apocalypse so I can die as a Dr
You need a lot of surface area, and you have to do something about any oxide layer that forms, since that can affect reactivity. (Fresh shavings or "wool" made from titanium material?) Also there is more that one type of thermite combination, so maybe those are worth looking into as well.
Awesome video. Love the slow mo shots at the end. It's also very educative to see what not to do in case of a class D fire... Good luck with your Thesis!
Because someone will probably ask, I suspect the reason Francium cant start a Class D fire is because its not really possible to assemble a large enough sample of Francium to start a fire with. Its so radioactive that a macroscopic sample of it would just immediately vapourise itself fron the heat of radioactive decay, and it'd be impossible to get enough Francium atoms in one place at the same time for even that to happen.
Haha…. Unless… ???
Literally a mini nuke from fallout
Something you probably can't do in upsidedown land is put a pile of magnesium turnings on a snow bank and light it. It's really neat. It burns, starts to melt the snow underneath, burning magnesium falls into the snow, the small addition of water causes the magnesium to flare up, and it sort of runs away. It will melt down very rapidly into the snow and lights up the whole pile quite beautifully.
The Australian Alps, or Snowy Mountains as they are also known, receive more snow than Switzerland.
@@moshly64 i was about to say that’s very impractical because who would in their right mind go to the top of a mountain to get snow to do a science experiment and then i remembered what channel i was watching
@@xpg2124 And based on his last video, the snow there might all vanish the second he arrives.
I want to see this please do this @Explosions&Fire
now this I want to see
I'd really like to see a follow up where you try to put a metal fire out using different kinds of off the shelf table salt, to see if it's even feasible to put one out without such an expensive fire extinguisher.
Well, the powder itself is less than half the price. The salt needs to be finely ground and have an additive that makes it much easier to flow along with a caking additive. The nice thing is that MSDSs exist and they list what's in them.
I imagine a good part of the price is just keeping it dry enough tbh
I’ve just recently found this channel, I’ve already watched all the videos and I need more!
I don’t often get uncomfortable watching these chemistry videos of yours, but seeing the zinc fumes really got my heart rate going.
Yeah metal fume fever'll do that ;)
Mmm, smells like drain bamage
@@elongatedmuskrat2690 is that his new excuse for not finishing his thesis?
@@telioty "I'm sorry Professor, I need more time, I spent the last week delirious with zinc fume fever"
zinc fumes are not that bad... problems only start with prolonged or frequent exposure. and being outside on top of that means there is very little risk
"I love talking about military things cause you legally can't correct me even when I'm wrong"
An absolute banger quote for the ages
Tell that to the Warthunder community xD
@@Blutwind _pulls out classified fighter jet schematics_
After looking up that Ti-6Al-4V alloy, I'm thinking you're going to have a real hard time lighting that on fire because of 2 reasons.
1. The alloy is known for it's corrosion resistance, I saw it stated that it's even better than stainless steel. Thus making it react with stuff is hard and/or it forms a really protective oxide layer around the alloy.
2. You can TIG weld the stuff without any special precautions. This makes me think that even if you get it ridiculously hot, it's not going to catch fire because if it could, it would cause problems while welding because if the inert gas was removed before it cooled down, it could start fires.
Maybe you could make it burn in the normal atmosphere if you tried to TIG weld it without gas, but I doubt it. Maybe try an oxy acetylene torch as that is both hot and has plenty of oxygen with it to make reaction more likely?
Edit, I actually found a study on the ignition temperature of this particular alloy. Their finding was that it ignites at 1680 °C. So it should be doable with a welder.
Metal fires are a subject I really wanted to know more about. Very urgently. Thanks for the video!
You're teaching chemistry to 350,000 people. That should merit a Ph.D by itself. Great video! I work with magnesium in my garage sometimes and I've wondered if I can get myself in trouble with it.
LOL no, he is most definitely not teaching chemistry. Really, bro? Have you even been in a classroom?
@@UnitSe7en I have learned much here, and gifted with such knowledge intend to NOT damage the structural integrity of numerous government buildings
@UnitSe7en lmao such a butthurt response. What's with the hostility, man?
@@NomTheDom lol
@@nollie_ollie8358 What hostility _man?_ I guarantee you're not taking away any useful information from watching, and he doesn't make them to deliver a lot of information - Or as it's also known, to _teach._ They are mostly entertainment and for his own experimental education, not yours.
If you think you have learned something that you can take with you into the lab, or into the classroom, please expound on thus...
Blacksmith here. You could always set up some sort of open hearth forge. Buy some coked coal, build a forge out of mud or brick, use a shop vac as a blower. You could use that to get it up to a higher temp like 2500C, then use a thermite/thermate reaction on the already evenly heated Titanium
I think the reason why the molten puddle of steel didn't help is because the heat was easily sucked into the Titanium and dispersed. It definitely made it hot, but once the iron touched the Titanium plate, it instantly cooled down. If it was already hot, the intense, focused heat from a thermite reaction might be enough to push it over the edge.
Yeah I wonder how well molten titanium burns? If we can melt it, will the heat from its own fire keep it molten and able to keep burning??
@@ExplosionsAndFire Alternatively, you could get really thin titanium strips, or at least thinner than the plates you have. Titanium shavings are notoriously easy to burst into white hot sparks
Maybe putting some Titanium shavings on the plate WITH the thermite, if the Titanium shavings start burning, it might be enough to catch the plate on fire too
@@xXMACEMANXx I think thickness matters a lot. Magnesium in this video took surprisingly too much effort to catch fire. Fun experiments I conducted at home were much easier. I used foil thin magnesium strips (1/10 of a millimetre or below thick) and they were ignited by a regular old pocket lighter. I would be shocked if titanium could ignite as easily if it was thin enough. I think it would still take more effort than magnesium. I could not try that one because I have no idea where can I find foil thin titanium strips.
p.s. Don't try to set magnesium on fire guys. If it somehow drips on your skin and bury itself, you can possibly burns yourselves to the bone! (through the bone?!)
@@ExplosionsAndFire Jeweller here, I use titanium to manipulate molten precious metals. If you use a simple brazing torch running on oxygen and propane you'll set it on fire in no time at all.
Please never stop making these videos.
(Not unless I get rich suddenly and hire you to help me with my mad scientist ideas.)
I learn so much and laugh while doing it. You remind me of ElectroBOOM in a way. I love their stuff as well.
1:46 - The whole roof turning into lead over time is hilarious. Not sure if the joke was intentional, but made me laugh.
As others have pointed out, containing the metal in a ceramic pot will increase the overall heat transfer. If you want to achieve high temperatures, an oxy-acetylene torch or a plasma cutter from Harbor Freight will reach very high temperatures.
Harbor Freight? You think we have that here? Maybe Bunning will help, can even grab a snag while there.
There's also a thermal lance as an option
Acetylene is also just good fun all around.
what about arc welder? You can use graphite rods and they won´t melt
6:43 Warthunder Community: Challenge accepted xD
Watched a guy's motorcycle burn a few weeks ago it was the brightest fire I have ever seen. It was not so much the gasoline-burning but the metal on the bike.
This people is how you learn. A boy in his backyard doing stuff, breaking stuff, burning stuff. Great things have come from this rite of passage! Good on ya mate!
I’ve been a fireman for 10 years. When it comes to the transmission block and the magnesium they use in some of the cars it’s so much fun to me to have that bright white flash popping off like crazy. Because there’s so much dark smoke from the rest of the car burning the flashes aren’t as blinding but I’m also a nut and find it so cool
12:13 the burger king employee when I ask for no salt on my fries
How did I miss this video? Love your content.
@ExplosionsAndFire - bro, that was beautiful at the end. The lit magnesium and the water spattering it about was just mesmerizing. I really have come to appreciate your particular spicy Australian taste in video editing/producing and most of all... The exceptional sound tracks! 😂 Idkw, but I do love that classic elevator music type shit lol.
As a solid plate, the only way I could really suggest to set titanium alight is with electricity. Either running high current through it or arcing to it with graphite electrodes.
Otherwise you'd probably have to mill it into chips or swarf to reduce the mass of metal you're heating up.
I put my hamster in a sock and slammed it against the furniture
As long as he doesn't try to use the death trap, also known as a microwave transformer.
Should be possible to do with a welder though. IIRC AvE tried casting titatium using a welder, but it kept igniting.
@@TippyHippy Is this a confessional, or a desperate attempt to get attention?
magnesium automotive wheels used to be a major problem for firefighters. as you stated they are hard to put out and since they are surrounded by a highly flammable rubber compound that burns hot enough to turn asphalt back into a gooey mess it has more than enough potential to ignite the mag wheels. this is one of many reasons why it's rarely used in automotive applications now
Apparently this is starting to change. New alloy formulations are much harder to ignite and the corrosion issues are apparently solved to the extent you can get wheels with 10 year warranties on them now.
i was reading (well listening) to Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey and in that book he mentions that plutonium in addition to its toxic and radioactive properties is pyrophoric (as well as its oxides), and that plutonium fires were (are??) common in nuclear processing. (other fun properties involve 6 different allotropes under normal atmospheric pressure, with different crystal structures and density, making machining plutonium a pain as the stuff will change as it heats up while being milled)
You are one of the very best channels on YT. Always have been.
One month ago: *My thesis has been due for months, lets make ice cream*
Now: *ALL MUST BURN*
Love you Tom, looking forward to the next level of escalation
A week before the deadline, so guys what if we concentrated plutonium and played with it?
That slow motion shot of the water hitting the fire is SO EPIC!
it's eerily beautiful tbh
Salt
love your work. you're definitely the salt of the earth. i still can't believe how fortunate you are to be sponsored by VB.
One of my grandfathers worked for a major aerospace manufacturer, during and after WW-II. They had their own fire department, between military secure operations, and special fire classes.
At some point they bought a rather expensive and high tech, low weight in order to carry more tank capacity within truck highway weight limits, magnesium fire truck. When it caught fire, their sample of a Class D fire dwarfed anything I've ever seen academics pretend was a large metal fire.
Thermite variants could use more attention, eg welding to destroy tanks, versus CadWeld brews optimized for attaching copper heavy wire or strap to copper flashed steel ground rods, or tower bases, or to bond railroad tracks. That would also allow discussion of CadWeld fixtures to contain and shape molten metal, and their use to bond to structural metals without undue damage to their integrity.
I would just like to apologize, I’ve been watching your videos for a while now and just realized I wasn’t subscribed, I am to extractions&ire but not this one, I absolutely love these videos and hope you grow even more as time goes on. Definitely the MOST entertaining science/ chemistry channel on YT. IMO right up there with Nile, please never quit.
I love when E&F uploads and my crude oil turns to cranberry juice
For ideas around setting fire to titanium, one thing that comes to mind is Dicyanoacetylene- a chemical I read about in a rocketry book I didn't understand, but they said it burns at something absurd like 5000 degrees, so that's neat! Probably really hard to synthesize, almost definitely toxic, but I'm an idiot currently failing out of an undergrad software degree so I feel qualified to give recommendations on highly unstable chemistry.
Yikes that thing is the king of triple bonds. Wikipedia states it is the highest oxygene burning temperature fire at ~5300K. Can go as high as 6000K if burnt in an ozone atmosphere.
Tho the syntheis requires nitrogen gas over graphite powder at 3000K kinda hard for Tom I think
@@Dani-Nani sounds like a byproduct from making calcium carbide.
@@Dani-Nani "syntheis requires nitrogen gas over graphite powder at 3000K"
You know a bunch of chemists at a BBQ with a lot of beer came up with that. Drunk chemist: "What if we heat graphite to 3000K and add some nitrogen!"
@@Dani-Nani You know, it might be easier than you think. I wonder if you could make it with a carbon arc lamp like setup in a stream of N2.
Regular acetylene in oxygen will do the job, and it's almost as hot
Dude I miss you guys so much I remember your other channel… don’t stop uploading ! You are unique… it’s like a troll meets an actual chemist it’s amazing
I love this channel
Good to see fire getting more time on the channel. I was starting to think the channel is named explosions and fire just because explosions usually come with fire.
I mean, there's the oxygen video and the phosphorus video as well
Oh yes, magnesium burns. Lots of older airplanes can attest to that.
Oh, and the slo-mo of the water hitting the magnesium at the end was art!
I’d be interested in seeing different torch flames, like with different gases and stuff. I remember reading on Wikipedia that carbon subnitride/dicyanoacetylene has the hottest known flame in air, though idk how feasible it’d be to make something like that, at the same time it’d be cool to learn about the different properties of, say, propane flames vs acetylene flames vs hydrogen flames vs whatever other flammable gases
This is the best channel to listen to when you work on your PhD thesis. It constantly reminds you science is fun when the thesis writing is sucking every bit of your soul out of you at the same time. Keep up the fantastic work, mate.
the shot of the water droplets hitting the fire was gorgeous! great work
I really appreciate your mix of humor and professionalism. Great stuff man, great stuff!
Really one of your best here, great job. But, how's your thesis coming along!?
"You can't legally tell me I'm wrong" has to be the best way to win an argument
Hello! As far as lighting the Titanium on fire, methinks a beefy welder might do the trick, high-current arcs tend to get hot. A Plasma torch would certainly light it up, but molten splattering Titanium right next to a live Oxygen feed might not be ideal. As a last resort, some potent oxidizer that is used on metals to clear the oxide layer could work, it should act as a flux, keeping the titanium surface free of oxides untill it heats enough to sustain the fire. PS: I have absolutely no background in chemistry so results may vary. ^^
On the other hand, hot titanium in a stream of oxygen does sound like an excellent reason to bring out the expensive fire extinguisher.
@@dnebdal Can't argue with that! :D
To light titanium you could always use a carbon arc torch (or any welder on a corner of the Ti)
Great video
THANK YOU SO FUCKING MUCH FOR COMING BACK!!!!!
FROM THE .... From the UK! FUCK YEAH!!!
Always a great day when another Ex&F video is published!
You go Tom!
thanks mate!!
At school I used to carry a one of those cheap miniature butane torches in my pencil case, I used it to set fire to pencil sharpeners that were made from magnesium alloy. Once you got them hot enough it made a nice little fire! Also carried a small jar of trichloroethane (showing my age a little there) which I'd use to melt erasers into putty.
Please do a part 2 of this and try it with more metals but with a more extreme heat source.
If you want to keep it as thick hunks of metal rather than fine powder or turnings, then electricity is probably a good go-to. Dump some amps into it. It would be easier if you could get a strip, ribbon or wire of the metal, since the wider and thicker it is, the more current you will need - but there is basically no limit to how hot you can make it. Another idea, get it very hot then drop it into LN2 or LO2. (some will form nitrides with LN2 but it is the LO2 that will be the real fun)
Yes, he's back and setting fire to things!!
Your videos keep gaining quality! Love it.
Working at a Tantalum Capacitor Scrap recycling facility, we have a few Class D extinguishers.
If you have material catch on fire, best to move it away from everything else and cover it with the salt. Then leave it be till the following day at least. You need it to cool down so it doesn't combust again if disturbed in the presence of air.
Only have seen two bad metal fires. One that was because the caps were being processed with too little water. They ignited, boiled the water, heated more, split it into oxygen and hydrogen, then that caught on fire.
The other bad fire was because a coworker did not mix acid and water properly while treating caps. The caps reacted strongly with the acid, heated them up, and caused them to ignite.
I work in a foundry down in Melbourne where the main thing we work with is zinc, lead, aluminium and magnesium. I cannot tell how many times I’ve set mag and zinc on fire, it’s so easy to do and it looks beautiful, but with some of the things we do we also use some titanium cadmium indium etc and the other day we were mixing some alive cadmium and titanium halfway through it we checked to see if everything had melted together, the titanium was on fire and shit man is it bright never seen something hurt my eyes that much, just as effective as staring at welding.
Excited to watch a new vid! Hope thesis is going well!
This is awesome, I’ve been dying for a new Ex&F video ever since I saw Tom on Cold Ones a few days ago. Thank you for delivering!
For lighting the titanium, you could turn it into little shavings and it might be easier to light/melt
Glad you wrapped the tray in foil. Easy cleanup for the thermate drips.
Every day we get further and further from the thesis. I'm not complaining. Nice work!
binge watched every piece of content you had made during lockdown (I was missing my own lab) and was VERY excited to see you on Cold Ones today (which I shit-watch when on breaks from lab work) - keep up the hazardous work so I don't get tempted to do it myself!
Glad I'm keeping ya safe mate haha
How to set Ti on fire, idea:
Powderize to fine first. Fill into a container. Replace air with pure oxygen in container at high pressure. Shake container to get a good mixture of dust and air. Spark gap.
A few years ago when vaping was still in it's infancy, there was a company who was playing with temperature control using titanium as the heating wire. It was really easy to cause the titanium wire to almost instantly turn into what I assumed is titanium dioxide.
I absolutley love your choice of fuses.
I'm a bit surprised you first went the route of thermite rather than increasing the surface area of your sample. At the machine shop where I work we have a class-D extinguisher because we occasionally machine magnesium. The hazard is really not the parts themselves but the chips from them. Those can catch fire quite easily if exposed to heat. Since everything within our CNC mills is being constantly sprayed with cutting coolant that's usually not much of a factor but we still need to have the extinguisher on hand just in case.
We had a machine shop that would machine pure Ti as well as a few alloys.
I remember some of the greybeards letting Ti shavings pile up and then accidentally causing a fire through friction.
They'd grab the pliers, swear, and then flick the burning blob of Ti into the concrete hall where it would fizzle out after a few seconds.
If you want titanium to light more readily you should try the chips that come off machining processes. Usually when you hear about titanium fires its in the context of a machine shop with large piles of these shavings laying around, so i figure those light better (plus there's a bunch more surface area)