# Impossible Perbromate Pyrotechnics at home

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Explosions&Fire
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ayFiLpXWTI
- **Дата:** 12.10.2025
- **Длительность:** 21:27
- **Просмотры:** 447,253

## Описание

Science is possible. But is it pointful? Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ExplosionsandFire 
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Thanks so much to Indigo for a lot of help with editing on this one!!

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ayFiLpXWTI) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

This is the per bromate iron. In the early 1960s, many scientists had been trying to make this for years. A lot of them thought it was impossible until one man in the late 1960s finally made it. And it really makes you think, what is all this for? You know, like what is the point of everything? What's the hello? Welcome back to another episode of explosions and fire. And today we're talking about peromates. But before we talk about per bromates, we have to talk about perchlorates. And when I say talk about, I mean we're going to blow some stuff up. Let's just go blow some stuff up immediately. Chlorates are a very common oxidizer in pyrochnics. And they're very good at oxidizing a metal fuel especially. You've got this high oxidation state chlorine surrounded by four oxygen. So it's a lot of oxygen to give — beautiful — but also the small ion is actually very stable. It doesn't want to give up those oxygens very easily. Being so chemically stable means that the pyrochnic mixtures aren't that sensitive and won't chemically degrade. But also the chlorate is very good in aqueous situations as well. When you have it in solution doesn't really break down, doesn't really react. So even though it may seem counterintuitive, quite often when you want an unreactive ion in solutions, you use perchlorate because it doesn't oxidize or reduce or really interact very much at all. Pchloric acid is also a very strong useful acid used in a lot of scenarios and ammonium perchlorate in particular is often used in rocket fuels. So a lot of solid rocket motors are based on ammonium perchlorate. So perchlorates are widely used and are very good. In fact, some would say they are the perfect ion with absolutely no downsides. Except for that one thing. Sure, your body thinks that this is iodine and it will send it to your thyroid cuz it thinks it's super iodine and it's not and you die. Okay, but that one kind of feels like it's a fault of your body. Your body can like tell the difference between like, oh, this protein is slightly different to oh, there's three atoms different in this 3,000 mega [ __ ] The second you have this boric iron, it's like your body's like, that's [ __ ] iodine. No, it's not iodine. Ruining the perfect [ __ ] ion. If we have bchlorates featuring high oxidation state chlorine, we should have per bromates featuring high oxidation state bromine. I mean, we have chloride, — chlorine, hypocchlorite, chlorides, chlorates, and bchlorates. — And we also have — bromide, bromine, bromates, hyper bromates, — but no, but bromates. And it confused scientists. All the other ions were wellnown. It was pretty odd to have this glaring gap, especially a strong oxidizer. In the early 1960s they were putting anything in rockets. They were using any rocket fuel they could possibly dream of. So to have a bromine analog of pchlorates that would make sense in a rocket. There was two possible reasons no one was able to isolate per bromates. The first option was it was just not stable. You could put that fourth oxygen on the bromine but it would just fall apart. The bromine doesn't want to be in the plus seven oxidation state and you're putting too much oxygen around it. So it's just not stable. The other option is it's just very difficult to make. So you have three oxygen around the bromine as the bromate and you want to go to per bromate and it just takes a tremendous amount of energy to put that fourth oxygen on. But once you've done that the molecule is stable. So do you try and add it in really slowly at cold temperatures or you do you try and blast it with you know whatever you possibly can to try and add that fourth oxygen on. This is when we meet the hero of our story, a chemist in the 1960s from Illinois, not Germany this time. There's been an oversaturation of uh German chemistry on this channel recently. So, we'll see how far we can get without involving any German chemistry in this video. Dr. Evan Appleman in 1968 is working in Illinois in a national laboratory under the US Department of Energy and he has a brilliant idea. What if we don't even try to do chemistry to make permate? What if we just will it into existence? He takes selenium radiates it with neutrons. Thanks US Department of Energy in the 1960s then makes the selenate and in a little while the selenium decomposes radioactively into bromine. Hey, he's got per bromate. This process does not make very much per bromate. But it shows him that it's stable and reveals to him a constant horror of experimental science which is sometimes the answer to experimental problems is just to try a little harder. It's a terrifying thought. He does two initial methods to make small amounts of pomates. Actually, the term he uses in a later paper I really like. He refers to it as a ponderable amount of pomates. I like that. Just enough to ponder on. He does an electrochemistry route which is not very efficient. He basically bashes all these ions together and searches through the rubble and finds a bit of permate. And then he uses xenon dloulloride, a very strong oxidizer, which is a bit of a flex. Actually, this is 1968 and xenon dfluoride was only discovered in 1962. So, it feels like he's just flexing that he's got access to this molecule. I

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ayFiLpXWTI&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

think he's an expert in like xenon and florine chemistry in the US at the time. So, he tries this brand new exotic reagent. It works to make permates. He publishes the single author paper, continues on, and then does a better synthesis using florine gas. Once again, a bit of a flex that he's got florine gas. He can make permate salts. He can make proo acid. But because of the difficulty in the synthesis and the dangers involved and the high cost, permates don't find industrial use anywhere. I mean, even Apple himself, a florine expert, says this procedure is reasonably dangerous. You can't use platinum tubing for the synthesis cuz it interrupts with the peromate formation. So, they have to use teflon, but there's a knot in the paper that sometimes the teflon just catches on fire. So, you know, that's cool. And also, this is a brand new ion in the universe. It doesn't exist anywhere else. Before you can use it industrially, you have to at least have some idea of its toxicity cuz your body probably thinks this is another important ion and will hyper accumulate it in another organ. So, before any industrial use, you've got to find a mouse willing to volunteer to eat its body weight in it. So, there's no one stupid enough to spend all this time, money, effort, and resources to make prooed pyrochnic mixtures. Okay, so we have to make permates here in my shed. How do we do it? Build a florine generator. I'll just generate some florine. No, we're not building a florine generator. We can't do it. What other options do we have? There is electrochemistry, but electrochemistry isn't real. It's just a madeup science for wizards. Whatever. We're never going to get any good results from electrochemistry. I mean, even the Appleman wizard himself doesn't get good results from electrochemistry. So, we're not doing electrochemistry. Um, so that leaves us with xenon doullide xenon dfluoride. Xenon dlouide. It's a pretty dangerous chemical. But also the bigger issue is a legit seller is not going to sell me this dangerous, extremely expensive and rare reagent. And it's not something that's going to appear on the black market. Like I'm not going to get xenon dloride off the black market. The gray market though. Turns out all I had to do was send Bitcoin to a guy in Eastern Europe and he would post me xenon dy fluoride. I mean it was actually peak co time so they couldn't directly ship it from Eastern Europe to Australia because of some shipping shutdown. So, quick shout out to Elias Experiments for facilitating this xenon dloulloride through Germany, which I don't think is a crime, but also technically is help from a German chemist for this video, but he didn't do any chemistry for it, so I'm letting that one slide. All right. Anyway, it arrived. And here I have 1 g of xenon doullide that I'm unboxing. And you might be able to tell this was a little while ago. So, what happened? Well, uh, I got scared a little. I was a bit scared. Xenon dlloruide is a strong oxidizer, but that's not the real scary part about it. The scary bit is the florine. Xenon dloride is very reactive and will react with water to produce xenon and hydrofuloric acid. And it's so reactive that it will do this on contact with water in the air. Hydrofuloric acid is extremely dangerous. It's a small molecule and it can permeate through your skin where it interrupts the calcium signaling by precipitating out calcium fluoride in your bloodstream. It kills your nerves. The blood gets all lumpy and you have a heart attack and die. It's very bad. Your skin does a good job of keeping hazards on the outside of your inside body where you kind of live. I guess it does not manage that with hydrofuloric acid. That's a bad thing. There are some horrifically gruesome pictures about hydrofuloric acid necrosis, which I'm not going to put up here. But when I've used hydrofuloric acid in an academic environment, it's the only chemical where you have to mandatorily have someone else conduct the activity with you just to stand there and call the ambulance if you spill it. Also, even though it's a solid, xenon doullide has a reasonable vapor pressure and apparently smells are very bad. So, I think and rightfully so, I was a little bit scared to open this bottle of xenon doullid. As a consequence, the box containing the xenon dlloride sat in my car. It was in the back of my car for about 4 years. I think I was giving someone a lift and they're like, "What's in this box? " And I was like, "Oh, [ __ ] it. " Whoops. In my defense, my car does kind of look like a corrosive cabinet. And it already had rust holes for ventilation before I stored the corrosive in it. So, I should fix it. I say that every couple of years, but I really should fix that. I guess it's fine. I don't know. Can you imagine if I got my car got broken into during the 4 years I just had a box of [ __ ] C9 dip fluoride in it. Some guy opens it and it's just [ __ ] a lethal dose of a florine. Anyway, we move on. This

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ayFiLpXWTI&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

year, I don't know what came over me, but I plucked up the courage to finally open the container. Actually, I think what came over me was the thought that it had probably all decomposed anyway. It's got some vapor pressure, so it's probably all left the package. I've probably wasted this money a long time ago and nothing will come out of it, but I might as well open it now. It looks pretty well sealed. I mean, okay. All right. Well, if we zoom in, we do see some water droplets on the inside of the packaging. Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say water? I meant hydrofuloric acid droplets. That's great. Um, sure. The xenon dfluoride is stored in this small teflon vial, which I've never seen before, but it's needed because the xenon dloride is reactive enough to react with glass. So, it wouldn't be able to be stored in a glass ampule. It would just etch through it. I could tell the container wasn't empty as soon as I opened it because man, that smell hit me. The smell is like you made some really hot peppermint and spearmint tea, but you put eight tea bags of spearmint tea in and instead of water, you used hot bleach. That's what it smells like, but not really. It's very distinctive, but not very pleasant. Once we get past the horrendous smell and the danger, these crystals are beautiful. It is amazing to have a compound of a noble gas that's just stable like this in these huge, beautiful crystals. This is a side note, but if we're trying to make an expensive and obscure oxidizer, could we just use xenon doullide as our expensive and obscure oxidizer? Oo, that's a big lump. Yeah. Oh well, I mean we can use in pyrochnic mixtures if you uh just accept the florine danger. — Yeah, xenon dlloride does work for flash powder mixtures. The cool bit about it though is you see this blue glow and I've never seen this blue glow from a pyro technic mixture before and I believe it's the xenon gas getting ionized as it's being created and uh heated up and everything like that. So that's the ionization light from the xenon which is a very cool such a waste of an expensive oxidizer. No, no way. It's important. It's important science. All right, but let's get serious. We need to weigh out half a gram of xenon dchloride which we will use to oxidize a small amount of sodium bromate. The sodium bromate I made from sodium broomemide which I got from the hardware store and I just made it to sodium bromate in an electrochemical cell. But oxidizing it to a bromate takes a lot of xenon dloulloride and we're going to be doing it in an aquous solution. You would think it would react straight away but the xenon dchloride does actually dissolve into the solution and react and oxidize things there as well as break down into hydrofuloric acid and xenon. We know this once again thanks to Appleman from the early 1970s and his work on xenon dfluoride in solution. So shout out to him once again. Illinois. Illinois. It does mean we just have this deafly solution of xenon doullide and bromate stirring in this teflon beaker in ice water keeping it cool and nothing really seems to happen. There's a little bit of bubbling at the bottom and that's some oxygen and some xenon but not a whole lot happens here. Now, after all this stirring, we theoretically have made some perromate, but that doesn't really mean much to us unless we can isolate a solid sample of a pure permate salt. So, we got to get rid of all these other ions in there. There's bromide, bromate, and xenon and fluoride. So, we need to get rid of them first. The reference we're going to use to try and extract a pure bromate salt is from Apple himself, the original synthesis paper from 1968. So, to start with, we're going to add some calcium hydroxide. This will do two things. Firstly, it will get rid of the vast majority of the fluoride ions which are going to be removed as calcium fluoride. But also, it will neutralize this hydrofuloric acid, get rid of these fluoride ions, which will make it safer. So, it's a good first step to do. It's going to make this whole solution a lot safer to be around. Calcium fluoride is a colorless solid. So, we're not expecting to see any color here. So, I have no idea why it just decides to go pink. But, the idea is to add just enough calcium hydroxide to neutralize most of the fluoride ions, but not make the solution too basic. because then we're going to dissolve calcium into the solution and it's just another contaminant ion. We don't want it to be there. The next chemical we need to add is a silver salt. And the idea of this is the silver is going to bind to the bromate and the broomemide and precipitate them out. But silver per bromate is soluble. So any spare silver is not going to precipitate out any per bromate. Again, we're not expecting it to go any color, so it just goes black. And this seems wrong. I probably added too much calcium hydroxide. I felt like the pH was wrong. So, I added in some hydro bromic acid to try and make it just a bit more acidic. And I'm adding this in until I see silver broomemide start precipitating out, which is a white solid. So, naturally, it turns yellow. Um, and even when it's stirring, some of the stuff that's splashed on the sides goes a vibrant green color, which I have no idea what that was about. It's not a great sign. But all of these solids should now be able to be filtered

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ayFiLpXWTI&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

out. And we've removed our fluoride, our broomemide, and our bromate, and just left with our per bromate in solution. To make sure that none of these contaminants make it through to our end product, I also ran the solution through the centrifuge to make sure that all those light fluffy fluoride solids definitely get separated out from the solution containing our perromate ion. To recover permate, we just need to make up a solution of a seesium salt because seesium per bromate like cesium perchlorate is very insoluble. When we add our cesium solution to our supposed bromate solution, we get for the first time a white solid. But I wasn't convinced. And I was right to not be convinced cuz there's just way too much solid. And one way we can test if it actually is the thing we want is by making this solution again acidic. I don't know why it stopped being acidic. But we can again add some hydroromeic acid. Maybe that solid was seesium bromate. Maybe it was seesium hydroxide. But neither of them are stable at low pH. So by making it acidic, we cancel out all those other ions. But there is still a tiny amount of crystals still in solution. And when we cool it down and get it so cold that it basically freezes, we do have some crystals. It is a little bit off yellow, which is not a great sign. But running the solids through the centrifuge, there's definitely a heavier crystallin solid and just a small amount of yellowish powder, which I think is maybe some silver fluoride that made it all the way through. So much to my genuine surprise, we have made actual seesium for bromate here in my shed. It's not very much. I mean, it is a ponderable amount. 87 mg, but it's enough to ponder one pyrochnic mixture. All right, I got 87 mg of the bromate and 11 mg of sugar. I hope I got the ratios right because we've got one shot at this. One shot. Let's get this mixed up. So, are you ready to ponder? It actually worked. So, yeah, we did it. We pondered BRMate pyro technics, but all right. Well, why was that good? I just couldn't stop pondering, you know? What's the point of it all? Was it a pointless bromate pyro technique? Could we have made a better mixture? Was it even really proper promate? Was it real promate? The friends we made along the way. What? What's Didn't feel very satisfying. So, I think we have to go to our last resort. I said I wouldn't. I said I wouldn't, but we got to do it. Let's involve a German chemist. The second hero of our story here is Nils. Niels is studying his PhD in chemistry over in Germany. But more importantly, he is a supporter of explosions of fire on Patreon. So when I posted, hey, I'm thinking about making these per bromates, this obscure compound that basically no one had. He messaged like, oh yeah, I'm just doing my PhD on that. I believe he's using them for silicon etchent for semiconductors, which is cool. But to do that, he needs to make them because no one's got bromates. Niels is doing the classic good for bromate synthesis using florine gas which he's able to do in Professor Krauss's lab and he's actually doing it really well and managed to scale it up to a large amount and has made new purification techniques that would have been really useful for me if I had thought about it and I wouldn't had to do all this stupid ion exchange stuff because it just apparently you can just rec crystallize it from acetone. And anyway, he's writing up a paper and should soon be published about the good synthesis of her bromates, which is probably very overdue. But that's not why Neils is a hero. Neils is a hero because he said, "Yeah, I'll send you some. Whatever. I'll send you a whole damn gram of her bronate. " Now, don't get greedy. One gram doesn't look like a lot compared to these big pictures of a lot of bromate. But he sent this one gram before he had worked out these large scale procedures when there were hardly any grams of peromate in the world. and he was like here's a whole gram of permate. So we have here some official seesium per bromate in my hands finally once again test some per bromate pyrochnics. Let's go. All right. This is some cesium perate and sugar and then cesium per bromate and sugar. So we'll light it from the cesium perchlorate side. Wa! The primroate is fantastic. That's sick. — Okay, this one is 100 mg broate, 10 mg aluminium, 10 mg sulfur. Uh, more traditional flash recipe that I won't spill. That kind of sucked. So here I have 150 mig of broate, 15 mg

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ayFiLpXWTI&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 21:00)

of hexamine and this is 10 to 15 mg of hapneium powder. Obviously show Oh yeah, it's gone. It's good, but it's not as good as porates. It's just like a heavier batter version of pchlorates. And we already have pchlorates. I don't think that's good. Is that really the point? No, I know what the point is. Last year I got the chance to go to Germany and you know who was there? Neils. I got to have a beer with Neils. So surprise. The point of the promate is the friends we make along the way. Oh, it doesn't matter that bromate sucks cuz I got to buy him a beer. Well, I mean, actually, well, it was a cash only bar and I didn't realize that that there was a cash only bar, so technically he bought the beer. He actually bought four beers for me actually because um they kept asking and I didn't have any money. Um and yeah, so he bought me all the beers and um he had to drive about 4 hours to meet me um to buy me all the beers. And um I'm I'm not a good friend.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/20467*