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World's Most Exciting Chemistry Movies

Posted by michael on from the blinded-me-with-science dept.

Michael Buckbee writes: "After Dan's page got too slashdotted to view, I ran a quick search on Google for more more fun Ferroliquid sites and stumbled into a collection of movies that I wish had been taken in my chemistry classes. Almost all of the experiment descriptions lean heavily on the phrase "EXTREME DANGER" and many contain other fun words like: "Explosion", "Toxic", "Detonation", and "Diazotization"."

2 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Magnetohydrodynamic propulsion by Spootnik · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here's a short depiction of what I'm trying to accomplish. If you've got any ideas - pass them my way...I've got a balloon of ferrofluid suspended inside a tube filled with the water - attached to the walls. Outside the tube I have a configuration of solenoids, hooked up to deliver a magnetic field in sequence starting at one end of the tube - and stepping to the other end. The effect should expand the balloon to the walls of the tube, and the stepping of this bubble down the tube should propell the water... Hopefully in a smooth fashion. I've got everything working except the sequencing drivers for the solenoids, so it's looking good so far.

    I never got around to trying to build an MHD fountain that would shoot salt water up in the air past a large magnet and a pair of electrodes. Has anyone tried this kind of a project?

  2. Building an MHD fountain. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I never got around to trying to build an MHD fountain that would shoot salt water up in the air past a large magnet and a pair of electrodes. Has anyone tried this kind of a project?

    I tried building a railgun once, which worked on exactly the same principles (run current through a metal projectile perpendicular to a magnetic field).

    My projectile was a shred of tinfoil. It twitched, but didn't move. Then I did the calculations to find out exactly how much current I'd need for a decent amount of force on the projectile.

    Even with a very strong magnetic field (think "one tesla"), you're going to need a silly amount of current to apply enough force to give a nice fountain effect (think "hundreds of amps"). This will heat your water up quite a bit, and give you quite a lot of hydrogen and chlorine gas as a byproduct if you're using saltwater.

    It should still be do-able; I'm just warning you that it won't be as easy as you might hope :).

    Use a nitrate as the electrolyte and you'll avoid the chlorine gas problem (you should get hydrogen and oxygen).