Monday, January 16, 2012

Doofus Of The Day #562


The video below demonstrates what happens when one plays around with liquid (i.e. frozen) nitrogen and plastic bottles, without knowing what one's doing. Turn your speakers' volume DOWN if you don't want to be deafened!







It's a darn good thing (for his safety's sake, if nothing else) that he used a plastic bottle, not a glass one . . .





Peter

8 comments:

skreidle said...

Funny thing about burst strength of bottles -- the smaller the bottle, the higher the pressure required to blow the seam or the cap, and more violent the rupture will be. (In college, we used baking soda and vinegar, and alternately dry ice, to blow up a few plastic bottles. 2L bottles were pretty easy, 1L bottles quite a bit more difficult, and 20oz bottles wouldn't blow.)

Mikael said...

Skreidle - when I was a kid I'd blow up 30cl(10oz) glass bottles(one particular brand of uncarbonated beverage had these with screw-on caps), using regular old baking soda and water.

skreidle said...

Indeed -- I think the burst strength is higher on plastic bottles vs glass due to the flexibility of the material.

skreidle said...

That said, I read an article many years ago indicating that you could blow a metal pipe with screwed-on end caps with a sufficient quantity of baking soda and vinegar..

Anonymous said...

Forget the bottle, anybody dumb enough to be messing with liquid nitrogen bare-handed will eventually do serious damage to their body(Darwin DOES believe in frozen skin).

Old NFO said...

Anon beat me to it... He's an idjit from the get go...

Anonymous said...

Back in Pfizer medchem days we used to load 2 dram screw cap vials with dry ice and roll them under other lab tech desks.

Anonymous said...

doesn't anyone take physics any more?
This is where you LEARN the power of the physical world around you.
And most of it if not ALL of it is WAY more powerful than any human that has ever been born and will ever be born.