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Today, I'm going to show you how to make dry ice. Now, dry ice is a solid form of carbon
dioxide. To do this today, we're going to use a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher and
we're going to use a material bank that I've made and we're going to have some safety equipment,
some gloves, and we've got some water to show you what dry ice is.
Dry ice is the solid form of carbon dioxide; carbon dioxide is one of the gases in the
air, to make it solid, you have to reduce its temperature to -78 degrees Celsius. And
an easy way to do this is to use a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher and as the gas comes
out of the fire extinguisher, it cools down because there is a high pressure inside and
it reduces its temperature. So, first of all, to do this, we're going to need a bank to
collect the carbon dioxide in, so I'm going to attach this on to the fire extinguisher
so that carbon dioxide can escape out of it, but then it will still collect some dry ice,
some solid carbon dioxide, that's why I'm going to do like that.
I'm going to make sure that my hands are protected by wearing some leather gloves like that.
And fire extinguisher works really easily, all you do is just take the pin out, press
the button and out comes carbon dioxide. So I'm going to do that now so that's going to
make a noise, like I said, something solid in there, and I take it off.
Inside, we have some dry ice, just like that, it's very cold -78 degrees so I'm not going
to touch it with my hands but I've got my gloves on. If you put it in water, water is
at 20 degrees C; if we put it in, there is huge difference in temperature. So, what it
does is it heats the water, this stuff up really fast and off come lots of bubbles,
the carbon dioxide comes out, we see lots of them, lots of bubbles coming out.
Also, carbon dioxide is so cold it will freeze things like this eraser here which is a nice
eraser. Let's put it in there for a bit; it will get very cold and it will be solid and
it will make a kind of solid noise when I whack it on the table. So I'll get some more.
You can see this now; carbon dioxide has started to come off, okay. And you can see carbon
dioxide is a gas and, okay, this is carbon dioxide coming off here and it's actually
heavier than air carbon dioxide is. So, you can actually pour it like I said so it's a
gas you can pour and it's going from the solid to the gaseous form there, so I put some more
in there.
And also, that, I mean, we can get a good effect by putting dry ice in some water. With
some fairly liquid in it and it will make lots of smoke and bubbles, this is coming
out now. I see if I can find this thing that should be quite cold now.
So, you can see it's frozen now, that's now at -78 degrees C. So that's what we've done,
we've made, carbon dioxides, solid carbon dioxide to dry ice, and we've made it quite
simply with just a fire extinguisher. And that's how you make dry ice.
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