Actually burning titanium

hello welcome back to another episode of explosions and fire today we have a simple Mission last episode I said this how do we set Titanium on fire I want to set the bulk Titanium on fire but for now I have to declare that it's not flammable out that's unacceptable titanium is a flammable metal we should be able to set it on fire I read a lot of comments on the last video talking about things that we could try there were a lot of comments about taking the titanium plate turning into powder and then lighting that powder on fire yes titanium powder is flammable but that defeats the point if we take the plate and turn it into powder we're just lighting the powder on fire just being pedantic I could make myself smaller and then the bits of powder would look like plates but the atoms of oxygen would be the same size I'm getting off track already we've got a simple goal this video and I'm already getting off track of where we're staying on track surface area obviously matters but I want to know if bulk titanium as the plate is flammable enough I don't think it's reactive enough and will get hot enough from its own burning to continue its own melting to keep exposing more titanium to the air it's pretty easy to find examples however of people talking about bulk titanium pies and while I've got no reason to disbelieve them I like seeing experimental evidence you know you could say anything but you could tell me there was nuclear testing on Mars but what evidence do you have I mean you could draw a pretty convincing blast radius maps with the craters and it would explain why the hemispheres are so different the noble gas Isotopes are really consistent with a nuclear blast and there's no other real way no one of making those Isotopes so White

to set titanium plates on fire I think the answer is pretty obvious and a lot of people suggested this need to go to oxy acetylene acetylene is an incredibly energy dense gas because it's got this carbon-carbon triple bond in it so when you reacted with oxygen you can reach incredibly High flame temperatures of over 3000 degrees which is hotter than hydrogen or any propane or map gas it's way hotter than that it's one of the hottest flame temperatures you can reach and the oxyacetylene torch lets you balance a cylinder of oxygen and a cylinder of acetylene in a careful sort of dance between burning and trying not to let the whole thing explode in your hands yeah I gotta defend myself a little bit here a lot of scientists aren't very good with practical skills or like trade skills and that's because doing a trade unlike science is actually difficult and requires some level of skill with enough oxy acetylene practice I begin to approach the skill level of a 14 year old on its very first apprenticeship which is good enough for me and honestly once you get over most of the fear of it starts to become pretty fun you know to cut through Metals I can cut through this bloody pair of scissors yeah actually can we

experimentally verify the flame temperature I think we can so first metal we have here is molybdenum which melts at 2620 degrees and we pretty easily melted I mean we're obviously going to oxidize these Metals here because we're throwing oxygen at them at thousands of degrees so they're going to do some weird chemistry here but you can see we've definitely melted the molybdenum and the next metal we have here is tantalum which has a melting point of pretty much exactly 3 000 degrees so if we can milk that we've managed to get a flame temperature of over 3000 degrees and once again even though the metal is not very reactive we did oxidize it a little and we did manage to melt it as well so our flame temperature is above 3000 degrees and the last metal we have here is tungsten which has a melting point of 3410 degrees so we shouldn't be able to melt it and if we pump so much heat into it we see it slump a little maybe it starts to oxidize and evaporate well I mean it's definitely oxidizing but we don't seem to be able to melt so we know our flame temperature is somewhere between 3000 degrees Celsius and 3400 degrees Celsius which is fairly consistent with what we see online in reports of about 3 200 degrees we can melt pretty much every metal on Earth except tungsten and a few others so it is nice to have experimental verification of that so but uh who watching the noobs there's no one on Master our flame is

definitely hot enough to melt the titanium at 1 600 Degrees but does it burn well let's hit the thin foil with it and I mean yeah it does burn I mean the foil doesn't really get consumed and it takes a little while but man those Sparks are pretty bloody bright and they would definitely start a fire elsewhere if um there was some flammable stuff lying around under the slo-mo we see these small bits of titanium are melting burning off and just sort of exploding in the air I guess they just get very hot and the oxygen reacts with them and at some point they just burst but it's really great seeing it in slow-mo this really sudden sort of I guess it's an explosion of these little bits of titanium I like how they really float in the air kind of just drift around a little bit until they bow up that's fantastic but what about the thick plate of titanium can we set that on fire well it takes a little while because these plates are like 100 grams so it can dissipate a lot of heat but eventually we do generate once again a huge shower of Sparks which is definitely able to set a fire elsewhere if um there was anything else flammable lying around holy stock that was bright whoa as an aside I want to talk about how

cool these acetylene bottles are because you can't compress a satellite because it can explosively polymerize and it's not safe to transport like a normal gas so what gets done is the acetylene gets dissolved in acetone and it's a special cylinder when you open the cylinder the acetylene bubbles out of the acetone and that's how you can safely transport it and it means that Australia has no way of recycling these bottles because they have to be specially recycled so what's been happening for the last couple of decades is all the gas companies when these bottles get out of service have just been stockpiling them because they can't throw them out it's illegal to dump them it's not economical to ship them overseas the other day they dug up tens of thousands of acetylene bottles that have been illegally dumped there has been a new company recently that have set up to try and recycle these assembling bottles in the meantime we're just still using acetylene bottles and there's no mechanism to get rid of them okay so in Australia we kind of care

about the environment I guess I mean on a local level right people like to recycle we've been recycling for ages we've got dedicated bins for it the government always runs these ad sets they're like you've got to put stuff in the recycling bin so we have and it turns out that the government has just not been recycling because it's not economic enough or whatever and in a great betrayal of public trust they've just been sending the Plastics overseas to be burned right because it's just too hard to recycle them they couldn't be bothered and when it started becoming public knowledge people got a little bit annoyed at that because the government had been telling people to recycle they thought it was a good thing you know people weren't really caring about how much plastic they were buying obviously all the companies were putting heaps of packaging material in it because no one was feeling guilty about the plastic because they were putting a recycling and it was going to get recycled but actually it was going over it so you come a company called red cycle and what they do is they say well the problem with the recycling thing is that it's just too complicated so what we're going to do is just set up dedicated soft plastic bins and all the Sue Marcus thought this was a great idea they got all involved put all these dedicated soft plastic bins in there and people really picked up on it because they wanted to actually recycling you're like well the recycling bin just gets dumped elsewhere but if I separate all my soft Plastics and put it in the soft plastic bin they'll be doing something with it and then it turned out after they put bins in every single supermarket around here red cycle weren't actually recycling it they would just stockpiling it in a warehouse and then the warehouse burned down and it became public knowledge that they weren't even trying to recycle it they were just stockpiling it for no reason and in response the government just allowed Plastics to be exported overseas to be burnt again how did Mars have nuclear weapons thousands of years ago and in the current year Australia can't even recycle polyesterly but what if we put some oxidizer on the

Titan we've got a thick plate of titanium we'll put a whole load of potassium nitrate on there and then we'll put on a thin plate of titanium and we'll begin to torch that again with the oxy acetylene torch once again it doesn't really sustain its own burning once the torch has been removed obviously guys very bright extremely bright impossible to look at without glasses and even that it still kind of hurts a little as soon as we remove the flame it doesn't keep burning so it doesn't really seem that flammable and doesn't seem like the oxidizing agent in potassium nitrate is really fueling that fire very good foreign I got some sodium bromate instead as an oxidizer because it's got a halogen in there and I thought maybe the titanium or react with halogen and that's sort of volatile and might get removed but once again it still doesn't really burn that well I don't know it's a flammable metal but it's not that flammable and once again we really have to compare it to magnesium here we once again put some oxidizer down and we've got a plate of magnesium am I going to be hitting it with the oxacetylene torch just for reference of what a really flammable metal does actually look like and um this is a tremendous fire it's tremendous even through the very darkened glasses there's no way I could look at that while this Burns I like to thank my patreons for forever keeping me on track and also supporting my upcoming eye surgeries I am blind with rage at the Australian government I feel like we've reached a healthy conclusion to this video we'll call that a win um I'll see you next time