i found a bottle of bubble soap the other day and it led me to ask, are bubbles (blowing bubbles) flammable? If not what kind of bubble soap is flammable and what makes it flammable?
No, they’re not.
They will be if you fill them hydrogen though.
Ordinary bubbles are not: They’re just air and a little bit of impure water. But you can blow bubbles filled with methane, and those burn quite nicely.
Is there any way to make the soap flammable? Could you thin/thicken/treat a gasoline-like substance such that when a ring is dipped in it and (normal) air is blown through it forms a bubble? Anything that would retain its flamability when mixed with water?
Lather up your butt hole, then fart.
Well, I know zilch about organic chem, so I may just be blowing soap bubbles out my ass here, but . . .
Soap is an oil-based product, n’est-ce pas? It’s made from lard. Does it remain a flammable substance when saponified (i.e., treated with lye to turn it into soap)? Why would liquid soap not be flammable?
I don’t think bubble blowing solution is a soap though, I think it is detergent like ammonium sulphate along with an inert thickening agent like propylene glycol. So it doesn’t have any fat in it.
The solution is a detergent in water. The surface of the soap bubble consists of a thin water layer bounded on either side of a monomolecular layer of surfactant, e.g. soap.
Soap in water will do fine, although some more defined chain length detergents may give more stable bubbles. Thickening agents may stabilize the bubble by slowing down the thinning of the water layer, which eventually causes the bubble to burst. To make the bubbles flammable, you need to fill them with a flammable gas. Even if the surfactant itself could burn, there is more water than surfactant in the bubble wall, which will cool the bubble wall and prevent ignition.
Ammonium sulfate is not a detergent. Ammonium lauryl sulfate is. Lauric acid is a fatty acid. So, no.
The single most memorable incident in my entire high school career was when my Grade 9 chemistry teacher attached a funnel to some tubing, attached that to a natural gas tap, turned it on, dipped it into a bucket of soap solution, blew a huge bubble, and had a student standing by with a lit candle on a metre stick poke the bubble so that it burst in a huge fireball all over the flame-resistant ceiling tiles.
Not technically a true bubble, but does anyone remember the toy called Super Elastic Bubble Plastic? It was this little tube of toxic-smelling resin that you blew up on the end of a short plastic straw. You could get beachball-sized bubbles out with a little practice, and they’d stick around long enough for a quick game of catch.
Anyway, the reason they don’t make it any more is because the fumes from the resin were flammable (not to mention highly huffable).
Oh, and Wikipedia says the resin was polyvinyl acetate and ethyl acetate dissolved in acetone (which is why the fumes were flammable). Man, that stuff smelled awesome.
What you never farted in the bath tub? :eek: