Whipped Cream Difficulties

Two of my favorite websites intersect today.

XKCD’s “What if?” answers the question “What’s the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker in an ordinary kitchen?”

Fill the cooker with oxygen up to 5 PSI, then pump in fluorine until it starts escaping through the safety valve. Put the vessel over an open flame until it reaches 700°C (That’s °C, not °F. Yes, this will probably set off the smoke alarm.) Now, pump the hot gas over a liquid-oxygen-cooled stainless steel surface.

I want to start a Kickstarter in order to get someone to do this and put it on YouTube, where I can watch it from a safe distance. Anyway, this is how you get dioxygen difluoride, or FOOF.

The fun part is that XKCD goes on to quote Derek Lowe’s discussion of FOOF (yet another in the “Things I Won’t Work With” series). A part XKCD left out, discussing a scientific paper on the properties of FOOF:

The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn’t react it with: ammonia (“vigorous”, this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine (“violent explosion”, so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic.

This also gives me a transparent excuse to link another more recent Derek Lowe post, with YouTube video from France of some scientists doing science! Specifically, the French scientists in question are reacting chlorine trifluoride with various common laboratory objects: plexiglass, wood, and a gas mask, among other items. The results are entertaining, for values of entertaining that include “Gee, I’m glad these guys are doing it and not me.”

Somebody in the comments posted this link to the older version of Air Products Safetygram #39: the newer version is described as “sanitized”, and lacks the photos of raw chicken on fire.

One eyewitness described the incident by stating, “The concrete was on fire!”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Clippings, Geek, Obits, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.