> fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature. But that's how you get it to react with oxygen to make a product that's worse in pretty much every way.
That kind of prose is why I love reading this chap's stuff.
> Hangzhou Sage Chemical Company. They offer it in 100g, 500g, and 1 kilo amounts, which is interesting, because I don't think a kilo of dioxygen difluoride has ever existed. Someone should call them on this - ask for the free shipping, and if they object, tell them Amazon offers it on this item. Serves 'em right. Morons.
Some chemical suppliers seem to have autogenerated items, some/many are non-sense and I guess they just hope that you find something and they can make it? I found the example below a while ago but they have since removed it.
No, its not impossible. You can make it in the lab without too much difficulty if you have liquid nitrogen. Just not sold like this and you can't really contain it in a practical vessel as the pressure at room temperature would be too extreme, you store liquids or compressed gases.
Off topic, but I Googled "argon powder" and the AI overview thing hallucinated that the term means metal powders used for 3D printing, stored under argon to prevent oxidation. There are no actual results using the term in that sense, as far as I can tell.
Google search should not be returning an incorrect hallucination that sounds plausible ahead of the actual search results. It's so confidently wrong. Google is SO BAD NOW at searching for specific expressions.
At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature.
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.
> Just to get the ball rolling, here’s a few of the more unusual things chlorine trifluoride is known to set fire to on contact: glass, sand, asbestos, rust, concrete, people, pyrex, cloth, and the dreams of children…
So, might be "inspiration". I suspect "Melissa" did not "find out today" - chlorine trifluoride isn't exactly the stuff you discuss at your average dinner table.
You need a whole bunch of expertise to write about it. Gizmodo does not usually have this expertise, but its writers do usually recognize snappy writing that might go viral.
Ah, I miss the days when this sort of soft plagiarism required a minimal level of effort and even some genuine research. It might even rise to the level of "acceptable" if she cited her sources more thoroughly. Sadly, as presented, her choice of both anecdotes and example materials makes it pretty clear that the author is mostly just rearranging Lowe's and Clark's words.
This is a quote from "Ignition!" The particular quoted passage from that book is one of the highlights of the unique ironic tone the author used to describe real and dangerous chemical research.
The book firmly establishes its tone with the first two pictures at the front: a successful rocket engine test and the remaining rubble of the same test stand after a failed test.
I suppose Derek's writing style is similar enough that it's easy to accidentally credit him for that line.
I have to wonder whether Clark's influence is a significant contributor to his writing style. It would be fun to ask him. They could, of course, have come to it independently.
One of the fun parts of chemistry is that most chemicals that ordinarily exist are quite far from having the most extreme possible properties that you can ascribe to a chemical. It doesn’t really matter what the property is. This is almost by definition, as “extreme properties” is roughly a synonym for “extremely unfavorable thermodynamics”.
Nonetheless, chemists are obsessed with these because in theory you can engineer chemicals with completely implausible, or at the very least counter-intuitive, properties in a lab if you can figure out how to do it. It is the equivalent of extreme performance-engineering geekery in software. You do it because you can, not necessarily because you have a use case.
Topics like “theoretical limits of high explosive power” [0] and a lot of other things that will put you on a government list are something chemists definitely geek out on.
The Rocketdyne Tripropellant rocket had great specific impulse, one of the best. But-- there are many reasons it never caught on: one of the byproducts was FOOF, along with other things like hydrofluoric acid.
If you want to actually get momentum out of a rocket, the reaction products are going to touch the combustion chamber walls and the nozzle. While film cooling can help with minimizing heat transfer from the hot stuff, I doubt it’s enough to keep this stuff from eating your engine from the inside.
They actually did build a test article and ran the engine a few times, enough to gather the data but it indeed ate the engine, and the concrete and the rocks and coated it all with explosive powder.
They did imagine coating the proposed launch complex with quartz but it quickly became obvious it was going to be way too expensive to actually build.
Yes, many. It's widely used on solid rocket motors, but it's considered a bad idea on liquid fuels because regenerative cooling is usually lighter, more efficient and easier to design and build. It's hard to get a rocket nozzle to ablate in such an even and consistent way that you wouldn't have to provide much larger safety margins than you'd really want to in a rocket.
Arguably, the solid rocket motor is in this vein. While I've never seen a design that consumes the outer shell, the inner material is designed to burn as completely as possible, and the chemistry and physical composition is even designed to cause the burn to happen in a proper combustion-chamber shape.
I think there's some stuff in a book called Ignition about experiments using Fluorine as an oxidizer in rocket engines to get a little better specific impulse than oxygen. Only problem is that the exhaust is hydrofluoric acid at thousands of degrees. Yipe.
From memory, that book went in at least four different directions with fluorine compounds. Parts are about increasing specific impulse; parts are about increasing density impulse (fluorine's very dense); parts are about formulating oxidizers hypergolic with kerosene or with hydrogen; parts are about formulating oxidizers for deep space probes, with a melting/boiling point range matched to that thermal environment.
O3F2 is the one that if you add it to liquid oxygen, it makes hydrogen/oxygen combustion hypergolic.
There's also adding a bit of Flourine to one of the Fuming Nitric Acids to make it easier to handle, because of the flouridation of the surface of the tanks.
Ignition has that lovely paragraph about some fluorine based fuel leaking out of the truck that was transporting it* and going through the road surface and then through the half a meter of concrete and stone under the asphalt, alien style.
* the only way to move that fuel was in a refrigerated cistern... at a temp so low that the steel it was made of became brittle and cracked.
I think it's quoted in one of Derek Lowe's articles about fluorine compounds too.
Retcon: the Xenomorphs were a form of life based around fluorine chemistry, which provides a physically plausible mechanism for how their blood eats through anything.
Of course that breaks the idea of them incubating in humans, since their biochemistry would react explosively with ours, but that never made sense anyway.
that book is really good and has some interesting hidden treasures, like a couple of sentences about adding silicon oil to the fuel mixture to create a self-ablating film on the combustion chamber. I think some amateur bi-prop engine guys use that in their fuel setups. It's funny how the book ends after all that research and exotic chemicals with JP-1 and liquid O2 are still pretty much the best combination.
I remember this article and I'm laughing before I even click the link. What a delightful read. Even more delightful I've never encountered this molecule.
Not the best example. Hydrogen peroxide is actually rather nasty when highly pure. I mean, it's got nothing on FOOF, not many things do, but it's still in a class where it needs to be handled with care and shouldn't be handed to non-professionals. Don't be fooled by the fact it's sold in grocery stores at low concentrations.
Pure hydrogen peroxide will do a lot worse than burn on contact with an open sore, unless you mean "set your sore on fire" (though it's more likely to detonate, or spontaneously dissociate into steam and pure oxygen).
Usual solutions for disinfection are 3~5%, at 35% h2o2 will bleach skin, and bite through it.
Read up on the Me-163 if you want to see the craziness that's involved with using high-purity H2O2 as an oxidizer. With a hydrazine/methanol mix fuel to boot.
30% is non-chlorine pool shock, and readily available where I am (VT). As it happens, it's also one of the parts of two part wood bleach. The other part is a solution of NaOH (lye, available in solid form for drain opener). Works great, best used while wearing gloves and a face shield.
Bleach, when people refer to the general product you can buy in the grocery store called "bleach", is sodium hypochlorite, not hydrogen peroxide.
You can call hydrogen peroxide bleach, or a bleaching agent, but if you ask your significant other for "bleach" you're not going to get hydrogen peroxide.
Speak for yourself, we have/had a bottle of it lying around. Used for bleaching hair and as a cleaning agent. It's not Clorox, but actually says hydrogen peroxide (low dosage though).
A. G. Streng would probably have been forgotten about like so many if he hadn't been such a risk taking experimental chemist. Now someone's probably going to make a movie or comic book about him.
The article is good stuff. It's a shame he's now having to be writing Crisis, Part IX etc about the Trump admin trying to trash things. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43418192)
That kind of prose is why I love reading this chap's stuff.