Well sort of. It’s a pretty short video and there are no accompanying clues or explanations about what is being demonstrated.
The teacher is holding a graduated cylinder containing some rapidly oxidizing substance. Just when the reaction really gets going, he dumps the contents onto the floor and it rapidly spreads out in all directions beneath the students’ feet. He must have briefed them beforehand because nobody is screaming bloody murder like you’d expect if there were fire rolling around the floor just inches below you.
IANAChemist, but the flame color is about right for a sodium compound. Those are easy enough to get that you might find it in a high school chem class. It oxidizes readily upon contact with water – enough that there would have been some kind of initial fizz violent enough to be classed as an explosion if it’s pure sodium; I don’t know about the compounds – and the behavior when he splashes it across the floor is consistent with small chunks of something in a liquid. He’s obviously told the kids to keep their feet out of the way, which suggests it’s safe enough for the floor, but probably not great to catch with your skin.
Sadly, I have fallen out of touch with the high school friends who liked to steal magnesium ribbon from lab period and explode things out in the desert for fun. They’d know as soon as they saw the demo.
Please do not use alkali metals like this :eek::eek::eek::eek: that would be utterly crazy.
This (also very dangerous) demonstration uses liquid methane. This can be done by slowly piping methane into a vessel in liquid nitrogen and liquifying the CH4 until there is the required amount (which is not much). you can tell its a very cold liquid when he spreads it across the floor by the distance it travels, most liquids would pool and spread a little, but liquids with a VERY low BP will show the leidenfrost effect where the sudden temp change forms a ‘cushion’ of the gas under the liquid, allowing it to flow much further.
Back in grad school, there was a setup we had that used what was essentially a large metal “test tube” that was filled with condensed alkali metal. To clean it out, the only way we had was to slowly pour something into it to react the alkali metal. It turns out you get a MUCh slower reaction when you use an alcohol than with pouring water on it. The heavier the alcohol, the slower and cooler the reaction. (sodium put into pentyl alcohol doesn’t burst into violet flame – it fizzes like Alka Seltzer dropped into water).
But most of the time we simply put in water. Cheaper, easier, more dramatic. Just keep your head out of the line of fire.
Put mossy zinc in a sodium hydroxide solution and heat it. Dip pennies in it and they will get plated with zinc. Heat the zinc-plated cents, and they’ll get brassy. A colleague did this experiment, but put the leftover zinc, wet with the NaOH, in the trash. It dried overnight, and caught the trash on fire. Oh- did I mention he used to make sodium bromide in class by pouring bromine on sodium metal? It didn’t end well.
