Kitchen Physics: Liquefying Carbon Dioxide

BOOBS! Now that I have your attention, READ THIS: This is NOT a safe experiment. Soy-sauce bottles are not pressure vessels, and a few days after this experiment, I tried another version at a higher pressure, which ended in a fairly frightening explosion in my sink. It left my ears ringing for six hours and tiny glass shrapnel embedded in my ceiling. If I'd been leaning over the sink, I could very well be dead now, or at the very least, extremely disfigured. I'm leaving this video up, but only for informational purposes. If you try this at home, you risk injuring yourself and others. I'm serious. Listen to me. I've got shrapnel-marks in my kitchen ceiling.

For a long time, I've been fascinated by high-pressure physics. Then, I learned an easy way to perform high-pressure experiments using nothing more than a fairly sturdy container and some dry ice. So, I made a pressure vessel out of a high-tensile glass capsule that is totally not an old soy-sauce bottle with some Teflon tape around the threads.

My camera's focus is sketchy at best, but you can still see the carbon dioxide (the dry ice) start to melt as the pressure in the vessel increases, until I end up with liquid CO2 in a bottle. My original aim was to try to get the pressure high enough to make supercritical CO2, but as it turns out, the plastic cap on the soy-sauce bottle acts as a natural release valve: it spreads open and leaks slowly when the pressure gets too high. Which is a good thing, because I don't actually think that the Kikkoman soy sauce company build their jars to withstand a pressure of 75 standard atmospheres...

Anyway, enjoy, and, if you didn't catch it before: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!

Category:

Science & Technology

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• kitchen
• physics
• high
• pressure
• liquid
• co2
• carbon
• dioxide
• dry
• ice
• do
• not
• try
• this
• at
• home