Dry water and Burning ice: all about gas hydrates--make money online

today on Applied Science we're going to

talk about two unusual materials dry

water and flammable ice cubes and these

are both somewhat joke names but they're

both very real things and we're going to

take a look at the properties today

let's start with the dry water this

isn't a name that I came up with if you

search the internet for it you'll find a

Wikipedia entry and entire master's

thesis all about this material so what

is it it's actually a bunch of water

droplets that are dispersed in another

material that prevents the water

droplets from touching each other or

touching anything else so effectively

the whole material is dry because when

you touch it or interact with that you

don't get wet the water doesn't come out

but it's still just a whole bunch of

little droplets dispersed there's a

common everyday material that's kind of

the inverse of this and that is whipped

cream so this stuff is great because it

is a gas that is dispersed in a liquid

and it creates kind of almost a solid

sort of material like this because of

the gas bubbles that are distributed in

there but for anyone who's tried to make

whipped cream from plain milk you know

it doesn't work at all the thing that

actually allows the gas bubbles to not

interact with each other and coalesce

into one big gas bubble is the fat

that's in here that's what makes it

whipped cream so in the case of dry

water we need this other material that

will prevent all the little droplets of

water from interacting with each other

and in this case that material is

hydrophobic fumed silica so basically

just really really fine sand like sound

dust and the dust has been treated

chemically to make it hydrophobic I

think they coat it with PDMS or silicone

basically so it's super uninterested in

interacting with water droplets of water

we'll just run off the side of it and so

the you know if we could somehow get

little droplets of water dispersed

throughout the powder we would have this

dry water and so the trick is how you do

that and thankfully a very easy way of

doing it is just putting the two

materials in a blender and running it

for about two minutes the scylla

particles are

so fine that the blender is not going to

really hurt than any like breaking the

particles in half isn't really going to

happen because they're just so small but

the big bunch of water at the bottom of

the blender is certainly whipped up by

the moving blades and so every time the

blade comes through it shatters the

water droplet into smaller water

droplets and then that gets coated with

this hydrophobic dust and as the

blending process goes on the little

droplets get smaller and smaller until

they're so small the earth they won't

fall to the bottom anymore

the hydrophobic forces keeping them up

into the substance are higher than the

gravitational forces trying to pull them

out to the bottom I'll put a little bit

of this dry water onto a microscope

slide and then load it under very low

magnification in the microscope and you

can see that the droplet size after

about two minutes of blending and sort

of a residential blender like this is on

the order of about a hundred micron in

diameter something like that you can see

kind of the two giant lines in the

background are separated by one

millimeter the ratio that I'm using is

about 5% fumed silica to 95% water but

you can try other ratios too and in fact

by changing the ratio and the blending

times you can actually make other

materials that aren't like a dry powder

like you can actually get sort of like a

cream out of it almost like the whipped

cream depending how big the water

droplets are and how much they're

allowed to interact with each other just

based on how how many of them there

aren't a substance relative to the

hydrophobic so the next time someone

cracks a joke about dehydrated water you

know just add water you can come back

with this and say well there actually is

such a thing as dry water but then the

next question that will come up is what

is it good for and if you think about it

it does actually have a very interesting

property since it's a ton of tiny little

water droplets suspended throughout the

material the surface area of the water

is tremendous it's basically like having

a cloud of mist that's just constantly

in this mist phase but then if you want

to interact with the surface of it it's

all kind of contained because it's a

solid it's sitting there in a beaker

so we're gonna take a look at the next

material and then put these two together

at the end of the video let's talk about

these burning ice cubes this material is

known as a gas hydrate and it is the

result of mixing a gas with water and

lowering the temperature and raising the

pressure until it forms this material

that looks like ice and melts like ice

but it's actually a new distinct

material called a gas hydrate even

though these gas hydrates are not

studied that much in the laboratory the

petroleum industry is very interested in

them because at the ocean floor

temperatures are really low and

pressures are really high and there is

natural gas coming out of the ground and

so it's actually very common to form gas

hydrates at the ocean floor in fact I

think a good portion of the entire

Earth's natural gas is stored as

hydrates at the ocean floor and this was

a problem back when the Deepwater

Horizon accident as well we had this oil

well spewing methane and crude oil from

this broken blowout preventer and one of

the attempts to make a stopgap sort of

fix for this was to put a bell jar

around it and then pump the oil and gas

up to the surface the problem with this

is that all of that methane produced gas

hydrates in the bell jar and actually

clogged up all the piping that was in

there keep in mind that this is not just

like a chunk of ice with a bunch of gas

bubbles shoved into it it's actually in

a completely new material with its own

crystal structure and lots of gases will

make gas hydrates with water co2 does

nitrogen I think does but primarily

these flammable gases methane propane

and ethane are the ones most studied

because those occur naturally in the

ground and create these natural hydrates

so in today's video we're going to use

propane to make a hydrate because the

pressure is required are very low the

propane molecule is c3h8 so it's a

larger molecule than natural gas which

is just ch4 or methane and the pressure

is required to make a methane hydrate

are really high like a hundred

atmospheres or something

and just producing that condition is

very difficult of course in the lab so

if propane the pressures are very low

it's only about one or two atmospheres

and the pressures are just above

freezing couple degrees C so the setup

that we have here will let us reproduce

these necessary conditions and so we've

got a water cooler that I've modified a

little bit I've hot-wired the thermal

switch in here so as long as this is

getting power it will run the compressor

and then I've added to it a PID

temperature controller that's just

configured for on-off control and it has

a really high quality Platinum 100

temperature probe dipped in here and

then this controls power to the

compressor in the water cooler I've also

got a aquarium recirculation pump in

here just to make sure the temperature

is uniform inside there so basically

we've got a really nice super well

controlled temperature bath here that

can go from oh I should add that the the

stuff in here is ethylene glycol just so

we can go below freezing no problem and

also measuring the temperature with this

logger so that I can see the trend over

time to see how good temperature

regulation is the vessel itself I've

made from two inch schedule one sixty

steel pipe fittings McMaster has these

really cool glass pressure windows or

sight glasses and this is just a coupler

and so the whole thing can thread

together and you can make a nice little

pressure vessel and this is rated for up

to 500 psi at 500 degrees F and I'm

pretty sure those ratings are either-or

so you can go up to 500 psi at room

temperature or up to 500 F at a reduced

pressure but we're not going to get

anywhere near these limits today of

course and then to have like a gas

fitting into this pressure vessel I

drilled in pipe taps this hole in the

side here and configured it to be up

like this so that I could dunk this

whole thing down into the chiller and

still have gas access and then if this

whole thing is filled up with material

the entry port is still higher so I

don't have to worry about it coming out

I knew that I was going to want some

stirring ability in this

compartment two and so what I was gonna

do is take this magnetic stir bar and

put it down into the chamber and since

the window is glass we can stir it

magnetically through the bottom window

and so I came up with this pretty much

hacked together it's actually a bilge

pump motor so it's meant to run

underwater and I glued some magnets to

the top here and then made this little

stand off so that when the whole thing

is put together like this

the the magnet is in the right

orientation to drive the stir bar and it

takes a little bit of fiddling to get it

right because the whole thing is steel

and so the stir bar kind of sticks to

the steel and it takes a little bit of

fiddling but once it's put together it

works just fine I'm using this little

disposable propane cylinder is the

source of gas today and I found on

Amazon and McMaster - they actually sell

the fittings to convert this disposable

propane fitting into a pipe fitting and

then I've converted that to like a

refrigeration

flare fitting for a convenient hookup

and so the high-pressure gas comes out

of the tank and goes into the regulator

and then from the regulator into the red

hose and the red hose connects to the

pressure chamber originally I thought I

would just increase the propane pressure

way over necessary you know hundreds of

psi of the vessel can certainly take it

and then I would produce the hydrate

more quickly and that may work but there

is a problem with this since the vessel

is going to be really cold like about

one degree see how the propane vapour

pressure is also pretty low and so if

you get it colder than the vapor

pressure the propane will start boiling

out or evaporating out of the cylinder

here and traveling through the hose and

then condensing into a liquid in the

bristle which we don't really want it

would eventually fill this entire thing

up with liquid propane so you basically

have to stay below the propane vapor

pressure in the vessel here which is

okay because that still higher than the

hydrate forming pressure we just have a

window where you can't go too low or too

high and as it turns out the magic

number is about 40 psi about you know 2

3 atmospheres and in this experiment I

would

start off at about 50 or 60 and then as

I lowered the temperature further I

would reduce the pressure that so here's

the setup basically add around a hundred

ml of water to the vessel with the stir

bar in there and then seal it up with

some teflon pipe tape and hook it all up

and put it into the chamber and just let

it cool down to about 1 degrees C or

even a little less

I set the thermostat to about 0.3 and it

would cycle from 0.3 to one kind of back

and forth you can see in this time-lapse

the crystals growing right before your

eyes and it does look like ice but

remember the temperature is always above

zero degrees C for this whole formation

period so what you're seeing is not ice

it's actually hydrate gas hydrate

forming after the hydrate is formed I'll

lower the temperature to about negative

five just to make it more stable

remember that it melts just like ice

does and when it melts it gives up the

gas so if I want to take a piece out and

do an experiment with it you want to sub

chill it like below its melting point to

make sure that you know you give you a

little bit more time so when you take it

out of the vessel it doesn't just

instantly melt and turn to gas it has

kind of a weird look to it it's kind of

like a white candle like it feels like

it doesn't it's not cold quite like Isis

because it has very different properties

and it's sort of chips apart it's it's

just a little weird and even weirder as

it burns and water drips out the bottom

at the same time you get this yellow

flame coming out the top it's really

quite a nice visual okay so I thought

that was pretty cool but how does dry

water fit into all this in my research I

found out that one of the proposed

applications for dry water is a gas

storage mechanism so currently if you

want to transport a lot of propane or

natural gas across a large distance you

have to compress it and liquefy it put

it into a tanker and then you know ship

it or drive it somewhere the problem

with this is it takes a lot of energy to

compress the natural gas and then cool

it down to make it into a liquids that

you can transport it wouldn't it be nice

if there was another material that could

sort of soak up all that natural gas

into a more concentrated form with less

energy

and so some people have been proposing

that this dry water would be a great

vehicle for it so I tried to make some I

put some of our fresh dry water into the

vessel and put it into the chiller and

ran it through just like liquid water

and could not get it to work so I think

that this may be a negative result but I

probably not there's some other weird

stuff going on one problem is that the

hydrophobic silica is an incredibly good

thermal insulator

I mean it's outstandingly good and

taking a chunk out and trying to burn it

like I was doing with the previous

chunks of hydrate doesn't really work

because the the flame front needs to

sort of melt a bunch of hydrate that's

near there to release more gas and

that's actually what's burning remember

that solids and liquids don't burn it's

actually the vapor cloud that's around

them that burns so if the material

itself is such an amazingly good thermal

insulator that it protects itself from

its own flame it won't sustain like that

the flame won't continue going because

it just the heat is gone before it has

time to vaporize more gas I found it a

little funny that not only does these

this this dry water hydrate not burn

it's actually a fantastic thermal

insulator in fact it seems almost like a

fire retardant in some ways maybe that's

part of the lure in the transportation

because it wouldn't be dangerous that

the stuff spilled whereas if you hadn't

liquefied natural gas as soon as you had

a leak you'd have this you know

tremendous fire hazard not really sure

but it is an interesting field of

research one downside with the hydrate

is that water is very heavy so if you're

transporting this by boat or something

and you liquefy natural gas is the yield

is kind of like a hundred percent so

every pound of natural gas you transport

is a pound that comes out the other end

but with a hydrate storage most of the

transportation mass use water so you

have to do the calculations and figure

out well are we saving so much on the

energy not compressing the gas that the

hydrate makes sense or maybe the the

shipping weight is too much and so it

ends up being sort of an interesting

calculation if it works at all which I

think it does okay

well I hope you found that interesting

see you next time byeTop Search Keyword : online earning, , make money online, earn money online, online earning, online earning sites, make money online free, online money income, earn money online free, money online, best way to earn money online, online income site, money earning websites, best online earning sites, easiest way to earn money online, earn money payment bkash, online money income site