Hot Ice! Amazing Science Experiment with Sodium Acetate_

Welcome to Beals Science. I'm Craig Beals. We're going to explore hot ice. Now wait a minute. Ice shouldn't be hot. Ice should be cold. But this is a special ice. This is not water ice. This is something entirely different that actually heats up as it forms. It makes some incredible visuals. It's a great science demonstration and it's actually something you can do at home. I'm going to walk you through all of it right here. Stick with me now. We've got sodium acetate, hot ice. First I'm going to show you how to make this super saturated solution and to get it to solidify or freeze. I'm also going to show you how you can make sodium acetate from stuff you might have sitting around the house. But first what if you just go and buy sodium acetate? There's a link down in the description where you can buy some. Start with 160 grams and about 30 milliliters of water. We're just trying to rehydrate this. Now I'm going to heat it up really really really slowly. As it heats up you'll see that it melts. Then I'll let it cool down very very slowly. I'll let it remain in solution and then we can have some fun with it. Going in. Got a little crystal on my finger. Oh that's awesome! Hot burny finger. Look at it. Love it. And you can see why this is called ice. One of the greatest things about this demonstration is that you can experiment and get this to form any number of different ways as long as you have a super saturated solution and a seed crystal to get it started. I mean imagine the possibilities. I let my students run wild with this and they come up with some of the coolest things like adding food coloring or doing it in flasks. All sorts of amazing ideas. Now here's the thing. You can see that was a seed crystal. That was a little chunk of sodium acetate that was dropped in the saturated solution and that gets the phase change started. Now why is that? So let's talk a little bit about the science. I'll try to describe what's going on with a model. So that is our sodium acetate and each one of these is an individual molecule of sodium acetate that we've dissolved in the water. So now they're moving around separated from each other in a liquid phase. Now we can get them to go back to a solid phase with the addition of a seed crystal. That's this. Now these are magnets obviously but this is similar to what happens when those molecules rearrange themselves into a crystalline form. That's what a solid is. So this is freezing just like water would and this is more what it would look like using magnets. There's gaps in between where water gets trapped in there. It's not quite as pretty as the magnets we had to begin with but what's happening here is this is phase changing from a liquid into a solid. It is freezing and as it does so it releases heat. Now water like we're used to when it goes from a liquid into a solid into an ice cube in this case it actually releases heat as well. It's exothermic because the crystalline form of it requires less energy than it did when it was in liquid form but this models that phase change in a way that we're we're not really intuitively used to right because we can feel the heat coming off of this. You know some of our coolest shots are coming from this from our FLIR infrared camera. I want to thank the folks at FLIR who've been a good friend of me a good friend of science education and they make amazing infrared cameras that allow you to see science experiments and see the whole world in ways you never imagined and again thank you to them for helping support me making videos to teach you more about science. You probably don't have any sodium acetate sitting around at home but you can make it. I did the experimentation and the math to show you how to make sodium acetate from vinegar which is called acetic acid and reacting that with baking soda. The reaction between those things produces you guessed it sodium acetate. Measure 104 grams of baking soda which is about six and a half tablespoons and mix that with 71 milliliters of vinegar mix very slowly otherwise it'll bubble over then heat it up heat it up so that you get a super saturated solution you get a good reaction going on plus then you're going to boil off all the excess water then turn it into a powder and follow the same procedure we did at the beginning of this video. So it's one thing to be able to make this in the chemistry lab but I want you to be able to make it at home as well so simple stuff at home no problem and as with any experiment in science some of them don't turn out the way you want it. That's disgusting our hot ice coffee uh gross but with a little more practice I was able to get it work out perfectly with our homemade recipe. Hey thanks for watching I hope you learned some things about hot ice about sodium acetate about all the things science thanks again to our good friends at FLIR who are helping us share science with you and I want to remind you keep on learning maybe hit the little buttons down there subscribe like all the things I'll keep making we'll keep learning more it'll just be great. FieldScienceFieldScience.com I'm out of here now bye