3 ms·
Microscale Thermite Reaction
- mrnotcrazy 5mo agoDoes the ball need to be iron? Can we just take a 3d printed sphere, paint it with glue ,roll it around in a bucket of rust and then smash?
- mannykannot 5mo agoI would guess you need something rigid and dense to generate enough pressure, though I don’t know if that rules out your suggestion. It does not have to be a ball.
- krunck 5mo agoPlease try this at home. You all have rusty iron ball laying around, right?
- fer 5mo agoIt wouldn't be weird for someone in the south of France to have a rusty pétanque ball.
- xattt 5mo agoJoining the thread to see where iron balls can be sourced. Some vendor on AliExpress? Those Lucky Iron Fish?
- jcims 5mo agoHammer faces would work (def wear goggles!!!). Hit the face of the disposable one with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, vinegar and salt and wait an hour.
- gorgoiler 5mo agoCertainly a ball peen hammer that could be encouraged to go rusty for scientific purposes. I wonder if it would work well enough striking a sheet of aluminum foil on a hard flat surface?
- imzadi 5mo agoDoes the second rusty ball really need to be a rusty ball since it is covered in foil?
- jiggawatts 5mo agoBased on the title I was expecting to see “energetic materials”, which are carefully engineered variants of thermite. For example, alternating layers of aluminium and iron oxide can be deposited in the same manner as seen in chip production by evaporating the materials in a vacuum chamber. This allows layers tens of nanometers thin, essentially a perfect mixing and a very intimate contact between the reactants. Some of these materials have far more bang per unit mass than conventional explosives.
- vapemaster 5mo agowow I hadn't heard of this but it's quite cool. aka Nano-Thermite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano-thermite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano-thermite
- buildbot 5mo agoTitanium-Boron nano thermite is easily the most SciFi thing I have read today, and apparently Aluminum-Teflon nano thermite is also a thing.
- trhway 5mo agothat brings childhood memories. Not too microscale though. Rust was everywhere in USSR. Small buckets of rust, small buckets of aluminum powder. When we experimentally discovered the reaction - we were too young still for school chemistry lessons - it was "microscale" - we burned a hole in the kitchen table in my friend's apartment (like a true hero he told his parents that he was alone and received the punishment :) We also tried to make a rocket using the mix as the rocket fuel - it burned the whole rocket like a huge firework :)
- mannykannot 5mo agoI have something I want to remove rust from, so I have been thinking about sand blasting. Thus, this thought popped into my head: how spectacular would it be to use aluminum powder? (To be clear, I am not going to try this.) My wife’s reaction to this was “You guys…” but I know she would absolutely want to watch if someone was going to try it.
- etrautmann 5mo agoI suspect you would need much more kinetic energy to get a thermite reaction going than the aluminum powder in a sand blaster.
- tenuousemphasis 5mo agoI wouldn't have thought you could do it by whacking together some 2kg rusty iron balls and aluminum foil but you can. I wouldn't try it inside of a building I didn't want to burn down.
- cobalt60 5mo agoSomething like over torqued lugs on aluminum wheels
- brucer42 5mo agoGreat laugh at end of micro demo video.
- warumdarum 5mo ago[dead]