Hey guys welcome back I'm Nate. Thank you for joining me today on the king of random here in the studio
We love a good science experiment. I've learned about a good one recently that I want to try out
It's very simple
But should be fun some of you may be familiar with a movie called October sky about a boy named Homer Hickam who loves building
Rockets the movie is based off of a book called rocket boys and it explains that one of the fuels that Homer tested out was
A mixture of zinc powder and sulfur the mixture of zinc powder and sulfur is supposed to burn very quickly and with a very bright
Flash, so we're going to try and replicate that today in the studio using materials
We can easily get our hands on a cheap and easy source of zinc is pennies
Pennies look like they're made of copper, but since 1982 that's just been a thin coating on the outside. They're actually made
97.5%
Out of zinc obviously for a mixture with only two ingredients there's not a lot of supplies you need.
First is some sulfur powder. This is a dusting sulfur
Which is used as a fungicide and insecticide
On plants you can pick this up in your local gardening store the ingredients list this as 90% sulfur, so it's not pure
But I've read that it will work for this experiment the second ingredient is zinc which as I explained?
We're gonna try filing down some pennies to get a nice zinc powder lastly
I have a metal file which I'm going to use to grind down the pennies
Hopefully I'll get a fine enough powder that it will burn our first step is to take some pennies and start filing
Now let's tape a piece of paper to the side of our clamp, so we don't lose all of our filings
There we go that doesn't look super pretty, but it should be very functional
I've now grabbed up quite a bit of zinc from our pennies, so let's put it on our scale and see how much we've got
Our scale says we have five point four grams of zinc powder which is a little bit more than the weight of two pennies
I've seen a few different mixed ratios of the zinc and sulfur that are supposed to work as a flash powder
I'm gonna try one two one for the first test
All right, we've got one gram of our zinc powder now, let's add one gram of our sulfur, okay?
I've now got two grams of our one-to-one mix of zinc and sulfur powder
Zinc fumes are not good to breathe in though so I am gonna try lighting this off outside
Now I'm not sure how sensitive this stuff is in theory if you've got a fine grain mixture it can even light off with static
Electricity so it's a good idea to be very careful with it however
I think that our filings from the pennies are gonna be a larger grain
It might be a little bit harder to ignite, so I'm going to start by trying a barbecue lighter
And then a few other things if that doesn't work
Oh, it's doing something oh, I wonder if it's just burning the sulfur a little bit
It's not very dark out here, so you can't see but I think the sulfur itself might have caught on fire
Okay, that's smoke rising right now. I think means it just went out
All right, the barbecue lighter didn't work
So let's go on to try using a little bit of fuse to see if the higher heat from the fuse will get it to
Ignite Wow look at that that that burned before
Kind of comes off as a shell so yeah, I think the zinc powder
Melted together, but wouldn't light that's interesting
I'm gonna use the scissors to hold the fuse down because otherwise it sort of tends to take off like a mini rocket
Kind of like that
Nothing
Again, I think we got some melted zinc and I think the sulfur has caught on fire again
Can you see a little bit of that blue flame in there there it is?
Yep, so that's the sulfur caught on fire
But the zinc won't catch on fire the barbecue lighter didn't work and the fuse didn't work
So I'm gonna try hitting the remaining powder with some matte gas out of the blowtorch and see if we can get a reaction out
of that
Nothing well that didn't seem to do anything either
I think I've successfully melted all of the zinc and probably burned all of the sulfur
But we didn't get any sort of ignition nothing that looked like flash powder nothing that looked like an explosion
So I don't think that this worked very well at all
I'm fairly certain that our problem was the size of the filings of the penny
So I'm gonna see if I can do something to grind them down even smaller to hopefully get a finer mesh of powder
I've never ground down zinc powder and a mortar and pestle before but I'm gonna try and see if it works
Four point three five grams of zinc and four point three five grams of sulfur I
Have my doubts that the zinc is a fine enough powder that it will ignite easily, but let's give it a try
Wow okay that lit yep
That's on fire. That's more of what we were looking for all right
We did get a reaction there it did light on fire now that might have just been because the map gas burns hot enough to
Ignite zinc powder. I'm not sure if the sulfur made any difference or not, but it did light
It was a cool green flame
So that was maybe a step in a better direction
But I have an idea for how we can test this at least as a proof-of-concept
Depending on the chemical reaction that took place. This is either zinc sulfide or zinc oxide
It's kind of hard to tell which since I don't know if the sulfur made a difference or not
So we barely got an ignition, and I think the problem is the size of the zinc powder
I'm not able to grind it to a fine enough point where it will really light easily to test this as a proof of concept
I've gone ahead and bought some commercially available zinc powder
And we'll use that in the mixture to see if it ignites as quickly as we're hoping it will two grams of zinc powder
two grams of sulfur powder
Let's go straight to math gas
Nothing Oh weird that's like
Gummy texture almost it's all squishy like a squishy sulfur zinc clay
That worked even less. Oh, we got some sulfur burning though blue flame
blue fire from burning sulfur
All right, I have one more thing we can try all right that didn't seem to work any better in fact
I think it worked less well because we were able to get our other one to light off with the map gas
But not this mixture
I do have one more idea there are different places that say different
Ratios that you're supposed to mix this - I've been trying one-to-one with equal weight of zinc and sulfur
But I've also seen something that says you should use three parts zinc to one part sulfur
So I'm gonna try that and see if it makes a difference alright. There's three grams of zinc
And there's one gram of sulfur alright. This is the three to one ratio of the zinc dust to the sulfur
Hopefully this one works out a little better
Woah
Alright that was a fast reaction that all just went up in a cloud all at once
That was really quick look at this you can see it even sprayed
The reaction material all over so this is gonna be zinc sulfide all of this burned powder
That it just like sprayed everywhere. That's pretty cool
Alright now that was the kind of reaction
I was hoping for from the beginning it went really quick it even like it launched itself through the air
And you probably couldn't see very well, but there is like this mushroom shaped smoke cloud coming off it. It was pretty great
Let's do that again. Okay. I've mixed up another batch spread that out on the ground
I've made it into a little bit of a line to see if we get a slightly more delayed or stretched out reaction but same
Plan I'm just gonna hit it with the torch and watch and go
Wow
It didn't slow it down pretty much at all to have it spread out the flame traveled along the line like him in an instant
That stuff has just a crazy amount of flash power to it very little noise
I would have thought it would be loud
It was just sort of a popping sound and just a very bright light a lot of smoke
But that looks pretty great I get why you would think that could be used as a rocket fuel
It's very fast burning one more time
Cloud kind of came right at me that time
That stuff is really fun that just goes up
bright green flash and then big puff of smoke
And it's all gone in an instant and very quiet there you have it
We've tried mixing zinc powder and sulfur together, and we got some mixed results when filing down pennies
We couldn't get a small enough grain of zinc for it to really ignite the way we want it to
After grinding the zinc filings in a mortar and pestle for about 10 minutes
We were eventually able to get it to light off by hitting it with a map gas torch for a little while
That was a cool burn
But it wasn't really the explosive reaction we were hoping for it in the end we did unfortunately have to go some commercially available
Pre-made zinc powder, but when you mix that with sulfur in the right three-to-one ratio it went off immediately those were some really cool
Very fast burns bright green flame big puff of smoke that looked really cool, and I think in the near future
We're going to try and use that same fuel to propel a small rocket
I would still love to be able to make this zinc powder at home
So if you have an idea of how I can make a fine enough zinc powder out of pennies
Please let me know in the comments below there you have it now
You know that zinc powder and sulfur can be combined to make a very fast burning mixture that might work as a small rocket propellant
Thanks for joining us for this video today, and we look forward to the next one talk to you then
Here you can see we've got a penny from
1974 this one should be almost entirely copper if we file off the edge
Here's our 1974 penny on our 1983 penny
And you can see the difference when you file down both edges the penny from 1974 has a copper interior and the penny from
1982 has a zinc interior
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