Tag: chemistry

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    Carboy Combustion

    Lighting a thin layer of ethyl alcohol in a jug produces some beautiful pulse jets and a moving wall of flame that shifts and flows according to the changing pressures inside the jug. Like the video’s author, we do NOT recommend trying this combustion demo yourself.

    As for the video’s questions, firstly, blowing into the jar helps the flame because humans do not exhale pure CO2. With regard to the second question, the interior of the jug is initially thinly coated in ethyl alcohol vapor. Combustion starts at the top of the jug and the sheet of flame moves downward as the fuel at the top is spent. As that flame moves downward, however, it’s heating the air inside the jug, which expands and is forced out the opening. When the flame goes out in the upper part of the jug, that does not mean all of the fuel has combusted, simply that the ratio of air/fuel is insufficient for continued combustion. I suspect the flame persists at this opening because the air/fuel mixture is concentrated at that point. Any residual ethyl alcohol in the container is forced out through that narrow opening, and the resulting concentration of fuel there may be high enough to keep the flame burning there. (idea submitted by davidbenque #)

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    Gelatin

    Gelatins are actually colloidal gels, or a liquid dispersed inside a solid, cross-linked network. The crosslinks give the gelatin structure, but much of its dynamic behavior remains reminiscent of fluid motion.

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    Supercritical Fluids

    Supercritical fluids live in the region of a phase diagram beyond the critical point. At these temperatures and pressures, a substance is neither strictly liquid nor a gas but exhibits behaviors from both. A supercritical fluid can effuse through a solid like a gas does but can also dissolve substrates like a liquid. As noted in the video above, supercritical fluids are useful substitutes for organic solvents in many industrial applications. Carbon dioxide, for example, is used as a supercritical fluid in the decaffeination process.

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    Freezing Soap Bubbles

    This is what it looks like when a soap bubble freezes. Perhaps not strictly fluid mechanical in nature, but it’s a nice thermodynamics demonstration.

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    Fizziness in Space

    Removing gravity has interesting effects on fluids. Here an astronaut aboard the ISS demonstrates what happens when Alka-Seltzer is added to water in microgravity.