Yellow Powder: Let’s solve unsolved alchemy

hey here's a fun drinking game you could play along with this video every time there's an explosion do a shot like that one good day welcome back to another episode of explosions and fire today we're talking about yellow powder is a mixture of three ingredients which when melted together will reliably and consistently turn into a violent explosion the powder that's on the spoons here may give rather a loud bang you may need to cover your ears if you don't like loud bangs but this is a very unusual mix in fact chemists don't know how this one works okay I've spoken to both the violence of the explosion and the reliability of it are pretty weird but also another thing I find pretty weird despite this mix being known since the time of alchemy modern science really just hasn't got around to figuring out what is going on in this mixture why is it blowing up it's quite fascinating as far as I know what exactly is going on is a mystery we don't understand the role of the potassium carbonate in this it's not I'm scientist if no one else is going to get around to it why don't we solve the mystery of yellow powder or at least generate some pilot data so then when someone else gets the actual result I can claim some credit sure all right so to do some actual science we got to do two things generate some graphs and we need references we need to site someone that sounds like a lot of work so as a true academic our main reference citation is going to be myself from a couple of years ago let's take a look at the incredients list first up we have potassium nitrate the potassium nitrate I have is what I would label fertilizer grade because I got it from a fertilizer and it's kind of weirdly yellow so I think we will do the bare minimum of work here in purification and run a recrystallization of the uh potassium nitrate from hot water so at least we can start to claim it's at least most potassium nitrate the next ingredient is sulfur and once again this is just from the hardware store and I could run a recrystallization from a zent like xylene but I'm not going to I think the sulfa is fine it's just sulfa man it's not going to be that filthy it'll be fine you don't have to be balls deep in the chemistry fandom to know that prium carbonate sucks as a chemical it's not an interesting pynical chemical at all in fact if you were add potassium carbonate to any other pyrotechnic mix it would make it worse yet this is a secret third ingredient that turns a potassium nitrate and sulfur kind of reasonably fast burning mix into something that can explode on heating all of these ingredients are kept dry in my vacuum desiccator over some calcium chloride next to some nitrated McDonald's fries from a little while ago that are still in there I should probably do something about that now we have all our ingredients and they're already in nice fine powders we can make up a mixture of 55 278 this is the ratio I used a couple of years ago and it seemed to work pretty well then the challenge is often applying the right amount of heat to the yellow powder because it needs to be molten or it won't explode if you heat it too fast it'll just catch on fire and it doesn't really burn with any great excitement and if you heat it too slowly and you don't give it enough heat at all it nothing happens and you kind of are waiting there forever so you just need to get it the right amount of heat it will explode after some random amount of time and let me tell you this random amount of time oh man the suspense oh man I've blown up a bit of stuff now and I got to say yellow powder is possibly the worst one there's this huge weight and the suspense absolutely kills you like you light the candle what of it and then like you don't know if it's going to be 10 minutes or 1 minute and it blows up you literally you have to watch it the whole time I mean I'm not going to leave and just let it explode on its own um but sorry I make a good point but what am I wearing what is that shirt I found the shirt I don't know why I was so obsessed with this but um I obviously was filming back in 2014 from a very weird angle with a bright pink shirt on and I trying to think what that shirt was but I found it such a 2014 artifact it says want answers on the NBN just ask a local um which is everyone outside of Australia won't know what this means so I will very briefly explain what the NBN is right okay back in 2009 Australia's internet speed wasn't very good we were like 30th in the world and we had this really old kind of Aging copper Network the government at the time was like well what if we just ran optical fiber to everyone's House people were kind of on board it was going to cost like $50 billion and take a couple of years but by 2013 they hadn't really rolled it out very well so when the new government came in they were like nah this thing sucks what we're going to do is we're going to run five nearly to the

house and then connect all the houses we'll use the existing copper Network which kind of feels like it would defeat the whole purpose of the thing and be really shitty and that was correct by 2016 3 years later they were somehow 3 years behind schedule there were like seven different connection types everyone was confused what the [ __ ] was going on and after all that time we were then 60th in the world ranking speed of internet and uh we I don't think Australia's ever cracked the top 50 again everyone hated the NBN and rightly s and people still do I must have been wearing this shirt in the lab because I had it but I was too scared to wear it out in public because the public opinion of the NBN was so bad I was worried that as soon as someone saw me they would just like throw me to the ground and start beating me up yeah once again this is nothing to do anything it's just so stupid that in 2014 I was like what will I wear when I'm going to make these explosive videos for the internet I know a tail NBN t-shirt and then I obviously had to crop it out anyway where was I um I've genuinely forgotten let's talk about the elephant in the room God damn it I don't like yellow chemistry it's been the meme for a long time all yellow chemistry is trash if your synthesis at any point goes yellow it just stops working chemistry turns you into a hater and you got to let that happen you know otherwise the chemicals win it's only through hate does one stay human I don't know I don't where I'm going with that one but fine you don't have to side with my insane Grudge to agree with me that the name Yellow powder is an absolutely [ __ ] name fine it's yellow okay that name might have been fine in alchemy times when they only had three different types of powder and Google search still actually [ __ ] worked but you Google Yellow powder now and you do not get results for the Buddy Alchemy powder you just I know what powdered yellow looks like Google I don't give me some go damn recipes how is the only source on what a good ratio is this random Forum post from 2006 this is the same data I used back in I don't know however long ago I last did this and this is still the best reference source this guy just says source is a source like how is this the only information I could find in it fine so that's where 5527 18 comes from it sounds extremely specific so sure that must be good and while I'm being a hater the candle method for heating Yellow powder kind of does really suck cuz the wind just will bow out the candle or if it does explode the camera gets covered in hot wax beautiful yet everyone who does yellow powder seems to want to do it over a shitty candle with like a spoon which is very heroin core if get the thermal camera out it doesn't seem like it needs to get that hot before it explodes it seems It's I mean kind of around 300° which is well within the range of a hot plate so I got this big hulking hot plate for like soldering or something soldering preheating and I got these big copper plates to somewhat protect the hot plate from the explosions that we're going to generate on it I mean the thing gets pretty hot so it seems to work fine and I got very distracted about how Bud reflective these copper plates are in the infrared how cool is that it's cool but like I lost a whole day of work just doing this anyway whatever finally for the yellow powder containers I got this whole stack of these lip balm containery things so these are just metal tubs so we can just put the yellow powder in there put that on the copper heating plate and we should get a reasonably consistent heating rate so now it's time for our first bit of actual data what is the cook off temperature of the explosive all right this is 400 mg at 180° definitely sounds like I'm just talking [ __ ] when I say Cookoff time but Cookoff time is the technical term for it it's the amount of time where it's getting sustained heat before it explodes as expected the lower temperatures don't cause any explosion it's still well above the melting point of sulfur so the mix does melt and we see some colors start to come in we get a bit of a red coloration which is probably the poly sulfide so the sulfur reacting with the potassium carbonate but it's not until higher temperatures where we start to see the whole mix turning black and potentially exploding at any moment at any moment maybe at around 300° but it it doesn't so I just have to awkwardly go and turn the power off after about 15 minutes once again it could just explode at any time I cannot express how strange it is waiting for this stuff to blow off on one hand it's

frightening because at any moment it could loudly explode but also you have to just stand there for 15 minutes and you have no idea what's going on because it's easy to see what's happening from the camera's point of view but my point of view is much further away because we're doing this in metal tins we don't know if it's going to shrapnel so I'm far away is it going to happen how about now yeah see like it's boring does anyone have a fun fact to fill in the time um no okay well um do you know Cambra is the capital of Australia and it's the only World Capital as far as I'm aware that has its own version of ketamine it's called canat it was just discovered on the streets it wasn't really known to science like no one's ever done human or animal testing of the substance and so they just like ask the people like what's canat like and people are like a it's mid I don't know I think this [ __ ] is important like you pick it up only because you do the pill testing and this buddy can test is the only state it's the only place in Australia that is voluntary pill testing and you should see the stats that come out of there it's crazy it's insane that more States gets me every [ __ ] time okay so it only exploded when we got to 320° so from now on we're going to set the hot plate to 325 just to ensure we always get an explosion because I hate waiting around and then approaching it when it doesn't explode 400 Mig is probably the maximum amount of material we can do in these metal containers without risk of shredding and bursting these but um I mean the graph demands data so we're going to start with 500 mg is it even consistent it's pretty consistent I would say it's just over a minute there was one run that took a bit longer but it's always important to remember that in about 25% of all data points God just comes in and interferes just to keep us humble you know what I mean so three out of four is all right you take that you take that it all seems to make sense and we're definitely starting to get shrapnel oops I mean if we visiting shrapnel town we might as well go to the CBD of strael City so [ __ ] it 750 mg let's do it takes a little bit longer some good da on the plot and actually these explosions were very big and allow me to do something I wanted to do for a long while which is actually film the shock wave we can confirm it's a shock wave because we know how long the bloody hot plate is and we know what the frame rate is so we can work out the speed of the wave and when we do that it's pretty much the speed of sound and air so I thought that was cool we actually see the shock wave but um really upsetting the bird life in the area neat though so yeah that's data it I mean it's fine because I have extremely low standards but I think the next experiment is really the key one it's really a fundamental question that underpins all of modern science are the dudes on a random 20064 and post actually correct or not in order to graph this we need a turnery diagram all right those people that did that one semester of geology in University now is your time to shine all the axes of all the different amount I'm not explaining this very well % sulfa would be up the top of the triangle if it was a 50/50 mixture of the two it would be along the line and then a one one mixture so a perfect mixture of all the three would be right in the center of the triangle does that make any sense I it doesn't matter if it I mean it does matter if it does hopefully this [ __ ] makes sense to you if I've explained it well which I haven't we can put even more information on this graph if we use the color scale right because then we can put in the cook off time into the color and if it doesn't explode we'll put a cross there and what we're trying to find out is how much of this triangle explodes and we don't expect a lot of it too I'm assuming it's a pretty specific ratio that actually reliably detonates but yeah let's keep doing it we'll make different mixtures and explore them and they explode so I'll make some different ones and they explode and just keep doing it

it weighing out more stuff explosions uh and they just explode except sometimes they don't and you have to wait and the suspense is there uh so did a lot of explosions some of them smelt really bad cuz of the sulfur and some of them just sat there but it was all worth it gaze upon actual data first of all the mix can vary a lot and it still explodes uh there's some triangles over there that means that the mix ignited but didn't explode it could still explode after igniting and I think like one of the ones up the top here has a lot shorter time than I think it would necessarily otherwise have because it caught on fire only ran each of these ones once I'm it would be great if I did every one of these three times but I'm not doing that it's actually amazing how little other things happen generally they either exploded or they didn't explode there was very little kind of like semi explosions in fact you had to really go over to the weird triangle region all the other ratios just exploded oh [ __ ] I've really set this video up as if I'm going to solve this mystery um no I I don't know what's happening let's point out some obvious things obviously the sulfur is reacting with the carbonet to form poly sulfides and poly sulfides are kind of long polymerous chains and it's very easy to say oh that polymerous chain is then melting with the nitrate mix and forming an ideal mixture which then explodes it's too easy It's too convenient if it was that easy to get a reliable consistent violent detonation then heaps of different mixes would detonate like this but that's just not the case and I think the black coloration is for basically the ring cracking so sulfur exists in this kind of octagon situation and at high temperatures uh it breaks down into more longer chains but if you remember we can generate this black mixture and it won't explode so there's another reaction going on there's some speculation that maybe the nitrate is getting reduced to a nitrite and that's more reactive but all of this data it feels weirdly consistent and it shouldn't have that sort of same delay time if it's you know doing some weird nitrite reaction and I know what you're thinking turn it off what if we just EDG this guy along you know got him really hot then stopped well the mix is not explosive it needs that high temperature so if you go right up to the mark and then stop it's not some super reactive mixture that's been frozen in there so it almost feels like it's a I don't know some sort of I don't know but it's not a mixture of nitrite and poly sulfides cuz if that was the case it would be perfectly kind of you know the important bit about pilot data is a pilot is the first person to debark the plane so this is what I'm doing if you do any F on Research you got to site my pre-print which hopefully is still up on the archive site and not taken down for professionalism reasons or lack of professionalism reasons I can't help but think I haven't really contributed much to science in this video but feeling like I haven't contributed much to science is a feeling I'm very used to so I'm really not bothered by it anymore you know science sucks like I ain't about to give back to it science just takes science just takes you know what I mean it's great but you know what actually you know what really annoys me the fact that I can't get in contact with those 2006 Forum posters I mean they're the real heroes of the story but I mean 2006 was like 23 years ago I can't get in contact with these people there's no way I'm going to no one holy [ __ ] that's styro pyro the laser dude I I'm seeing him in like a week a s far I didn't really like the compet good