If anything at all disrupts the cooling systems to the many, many, many hundreds of nuclear reactors and spent fuel pools, they will go into meltdown and the planet will be radiation sterilized from pole to pole. No one survives. Not anyone. Everyone dies. And that's that. End of story. Refrigeration? You won't be needing it as you will be dead from radiation sickness.
My bad. Me fergotz that the preferred term nowadays is "alive-challenged" instead of "dead". I'm feeling just so socially embarrassed and disgraced at the moment... What a social faux pas on my part! I feel so stunning and brave to admit to having made a social booboo. "faux pas "... That's french, you know, for "big booboo".
The movie Greenland was ludicrous. The REAL ending of the movie... everyone in the shelter dying from uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting caused by radiation sickness from all the meltdowns.
@@satanofficial3902 correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Greenland about a comet or asteroid hitting earth, not a "nuclear apocalypse"? Edit: oh, I get. Me no reed gud
It is a certainty that every chemistry UA-camr eventually decides that they can extract useful chemicals from their pee. What truly sets each apart is when they decide that the value proposition of continuing to collect and process human urine is not worth it. Your limit is 7.5 liters. Impressive
I assume it's because it's literally free. There aren't that many chemicals you have in your home already or get at grocery stores for almost nothing - stuff like water, air, table salt, vinegar - and pee. Of course you can get more at pool stores etc. You have this sophisticated chemical reactor, might as well use it. It will turn concerning when a UA-camr finds a use for poop. Or collects their farts for methane.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 Poop is useful for microbiology, and the guy over at Journey Into The Microcosm has already used it for exactly that. I mean your poop is 30% microbes by weight.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 There is black soldier larvae toilets, methan toilets, dry toilets (i use that every day, what an idea to waste dozen of potabilized water to ... shit in...) Then i fertilize my trees with.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 I posted a question on Quora, maybe a year ago asking if fart could be used as energy or something of that sort. I think I didn't get an answer :(
Yet another Science youtuber I watch has earned the title of "Piss Chemist" If I had a nickel for every time that happened, I'd have 4 nickels, which isnt a lot, but it's weird that it happened 4 times.
The primary ingredient in DEF (diesel exhaust fluid) is urea so turning pee into cash might be a viable business model. Also, spraying DEF on your lawn or garden is an easy way of adding nitrogen
Pretty sure with how long it takes to process the urine that there are way more efficient ways to make money, and even as a side hustle it would be so time consuming you wouldn't have time for fun hobbies so it still wouldn't be worth it.
Urea is stupidly cheep like $3 a pound and 1 pound of urea would take about 40lb of pee (assuming 3% and non 100% yield) a human pees about 3lb of pee a day so 14 days a pound so $0.015 an hour
The gunk at the bottom of your pee bottle is completely normal. That is a mixture of salts, sugars, phosphorus, skin cells, hormones, smegma, semen, proteins and other volatile compounds. Some medications and metals are excreted via the urine too. I have 3L of mine sitting in my shed, waiting for me to extract the gadolinium in it from when I had an MRI.
3:32 The blue color of copper solution does not come from the presence copper(II) hydroxide - it is barely soluble in water after all. It would just precipitate out as a kind of blue jello. What happens here is formation of a copper(II) ammonia complex, or a kind of situation in which electron-rich ammonia molecules surround and bind to the metal ions in solution, forming often colorful, water-soluble complex ions ([Cu(NH3)4(H2O)2]2+). Please compare the color of your solution to something called Schweizer's reagent. It is a solution of copper(II) sulfate in ammonia, and the azure tetraamminecopper(II) ion is present there.
One of the problems with a DIY Birkland-Eyed process is that nitric acid acts like a dissolved gas just like HCl does, not like a liquid like sulfuric acid. Bubbling a large excess of air through the dilute nitric acid you're making quickly approaches diminishing returns. In my experience, you want to reduce the airflow to the a minimum to make the process more efficient. The same would apply to ammonia, but you're getting a lot more concentrated ammonia with urea/sodium hydroxide and no air. This is probably stuff you know already but eh... I'm leaving it anyway.
Exactly! there is a sweet spot regarding the power of the arc of his reactor and the airflow so he gets high NOx concentration output but not so little air that the production of the NOx becomes inefficient. Also the acid concentration should not be allowed to rise above 10% due absorption inefficiency issues, its more efficient to make a large volume of low concentration acid and then concentrate it with heat.
@@teresashinkansen9402 He's already using reagents like NaOH so this isn't really "from nothing" He might want to use NaOH in the bubbler to hugely increase the captured NO2. This is what's done in industry to capture nitrogen dioxide. You end up (mostly) with sodium nitrate. I've mad ammonium nitrate by the double displacement reaction of ammonium sulfate with sodium nitrate, concentrating and cooling those two salts causes the ammonium nitrate to crystallize out as it has the lowest solubility. You can make ammonium sulfate from drain cleaner and the NaOH + urea reaction. If you really want it to be "sustainable", you can do electrolysis on the sodium sulfate to regenerate the NaOH and H2SO4. It can be incomplete and still work fine. You have to get a bit clever when you're downsizing industrial processes to lab scales.
Air stones for aquariums don't dissolve air directly into water very well. The bubbles are mainly for surface agitation which allows for much more gas transfer. Look at what the CO2 aquarium people do to efficiently diffuse CO2. Inline atomizers might work better for you
I'm currently in the process of finishing my own Birkeland-Eyde Reactor by fixing the last few leaks in the absorber. Always interesting to see how others do it.
Seriously? Complete with magnetic arc-spreading? I did a crude one years ago without magnetics, just a jacob's ladder arrangement with active cooling inside a reaction flask with recirculated water vapor - a puddle of angry red-yellow liquid collected at the bottom of the flask, probably distilling out as that was the coolest portion of the glass wall.
@@zinckensteel In my current setup I don't have magnetic arc spreading however a stationary, short arc instead of a Jacobs Ladder, wich is much more effective since the arc doesn't restart constantly. I pump air into the glass container I silicon glued onto a tile I drilled holes into. My electrodes don't have active cooling which seems to be fine. Between the reactor chamber and the absorber there are two plastic canisters that allow for Oxidation of the NO, the absorbers consist of a few pvc Parts glued together, the water sits in two long pvc pipes to allow for a longer contact time. The gas is pumped in through an aquarium bubbler that is fed by a hose silicon glued into a drilled pvc cap at the bottom. I have two of these modules and a bucket of base at the end to scrap the leftovers. So I'd say my setup is the intermediate between crude and professional. It's quite simple if you look at it, but it should be more effective than the old "mason jar with a tube leading into a graduated cylinder". Basically it's a neon transformer, an aquarium air pump, a borosilicate container and a tile as the reactor chamber, some pvc hoses, two canisters, some pvc parts and aquarium bubbler stones.
@@zinckensteel Ive found that unless your setup has a power of many KWs with arc currents in the amp range, messing around with arc spreading is just a waste of time and resources, it puts more strain on your power supply and actually lowers yield. Im designing a powerful and efficient system but is difficult to do so because the higher the current the more NOx you get but its a complex play, because for a nice arc stability you benefit from high voltages but you also need high currents which that means more power however if you manage to have a stable arc at the lowest possible voltage most of that power turns into heat, current=heat output from an arc Voltage=arc length and stability. Practical example: A Neon Sign Transformer outputs 15kV at 30mA that equals about 450W the arc can be drawn as long as about 35 to 40mm while still being stable, the arc looks whitish purple and outputs negligible heat, now compare to the following, get a iron core 400W metal halide ballast connect it to a bridge rectifier and then put an inductor in series to the output of the bridge rectifier, say a microwave oven transformer primary, now you can draw some very hot arcs about the same length! they have about 2A of current and can melt things yet is the same power as the NST! however the arc is much less stable and does not strike itself if it goes out. The ideal power supply for a B-E reactor should have the capacity to stabilize the arc, to go high voltage low current to strike and stabilize the arc but high current and lower voltage so its hot as possible while maintaining the same power consumption.
I'll try to use platinum spark plug electrodes to improve the yeld. My setup starts with self oscillating generator on 7400 IC and uses automotive ignition coil. Biggest disadvantage of this setup it is REALLY loud.
@@niemam5825 A word on spark plugs: I wouldn't use straight spark plugs, I've heard that they have a quite strong resistor in them which makes them rather unsuitable for this application. I'm by no means literate on the subject, just what I heard. Stainless steel is totally fine. Also, don't use tungsten. You might think "high melting point, must be good" but at these temperatures they oxidize to yellow tungsten oxide powder rather quickly, can be seen in another UA-cam video on the topic from a small channel.
I have been trying to make a birkekand eyde reactor for some time. If you are going to pursue it further, I have a couple tips. When i first started there was almost no production until i slowed down the air flow rate and added a large "oxidation chamber" after the arc chamber to give the gas time to react. The reaction between NO and O2 is relatively slow, and the reaction rate is highly dependent on NO concentration, so a high air flow rate will just blow the unreacted NO out of the system. I managed to get something like 4g per kwh, but i think that my arc setup is far from optimal. I also had a hard time finding materials that wouldn't corrode in the presence of nitrogen oxides. I recommend poly ethylene. It comes in tubes of many sizes that can be welded together, eliminating the need for hose barbs or selants
I always love to see nitric acid production using the arc method. Is really encapsulates a kind of mad scientist steampunk alchemy setup, even when done professionally.
Yes indeed... glass columns with rising bubbles AND electric arcs in a jar... the only thing that could make it more mad-scientist would be if nitric acid was a bit more brightly coloured.
This channel, Tom's channels, and Chemiolis are the ONLY thing keeping me connected to reality instead of submitting to the void of despair that is the dumper fire we call society.
14:21 Just a small suggestion that worked well for me. When I wanted decent boiling stones made out of glass, I purchased some glass beads and some glass etchant from Amazon (pretty cheap, just a white goop with some HF-like compound in it), and I put the beads in a plastic container with a spoon full of the goop and mixed it around with a spatula. The glass beads came out _very_ frosted (even more if I left it in for longer or did another cycle), and they worked pretty dang well.
3:50 ? I think the reaction equation is wrongly balanced since you should be getting CO(NH2)2 + 2NaOH --> 2NH3 + Na2CO3, so you get 2 moles of Ammonia per mole of Urea. Edit: so you should be expecting 2.5 moles or 42.5g of ammonia from 75g of Urea.
This was absolutely hilariously unnecessary but made for some unexpectedly great content. Thanks for making the pee fridge, this is the 1st good laugh I’ve had this year.
When you do pee science and need to collect large amounts I suggest you to freeze it as you collect, that way you don't have to deal with the extremely bad odors of rotten pee and loss of urea/ammonia.
Great video as always. One note: aluminum has a tendency to make that particular nitrate quite sensitive, so heating it in an aluminum can may not be the best idea, especially in a confined space (such as the can with the lid on).
Those are the Absorption Refrigerators, they use heat typically from the RV’s Propane (although any heat including Concentrated Solar Power, or District Heat can be used) so can be easier than using a PILE of electricity, especially if that is indirectly from the propane.
@@ericlotze7724 True. They work great, even in really hot ambient temperatures. My family had an old 3 way camp fridge in our camper trailer. It could run on propane, 240v AC or 12v DC. Even on 42*C days it would still be able to freeze a can of Coke. They usually will also have a small amount of hydrogen in their refrigerant.
You could recharge it by just letting the water evaporate, but the relatively low critical humidity of ammonium nitrate makes it a bad choice for that. Potassium chloride, potassium nitrate and potassium sulfate don't cool as much, but they have higher critical humidities, meaning they're easier to "recharge" by just passive evaporation, or "fan assisted" evaporation. The biggest advantage of ammonium nitrate compared to the other mentioned salts is it's extreme solubility, you need very little solvent, which is great when you want to achieve a big decrease in temperature and keep the amount of water that has to boiled off each cycle as low as possible. But using a small amount many times to remove a lot of heat kind of makes those advantages negligible. I've reached a few degrees below freezing, from room temperature using potassium fertilizer, (I don't even remember if it was chloride or nitrate) just by feeding the room temperature water through a counter current heat exchanger. Nothing fancy, just feeding the water slowly through a thin glass tube in a balcony planter with the salt and letting the solution flow back along the glass tube. And by the way, I didn't produce the salt from my own pee, I cheated, I bought a 20 kg bag for maybe the equivalent of $20 a long time ago.
For an ammonia burner you can use the catalyst from a coleman camp heater or brick 1 from an old auto catalyst converter. The auto catalyst works the best.❤
Our and particularly Hyperspace's NSA agents will be popping off from this lmfao. great work tho this is my favourite bits of physics and chemistry. i salute you.
This videos are very interesting and good. The idea of making so many useful chemicals from basically free and abundant is really smart and cool Hope to see more
The idea that someone pitched the idea of a UA-cam video involving someone’s pee as refrigerant to a company and they said “Yes! We’d love to be a partner on this!” …is hilarious.
I love that you are harvesting ammonia from your pee. I wish the green energy industry would see ammonia for the superior alternative energy storage it is. If I ever have the time I might try something similar in the future. Thank you.
You should do a version where you just collect the NH3 gas, compress it to a liquid, and use it to build a refrigeration unit (with appropriate warnings, but NH3 is how refrigeration used to be done).
In Australia a few years ago, 50 tons of Ammonium Nitrate on a truck was involved in an accident, it was subjected to a smouldering fire, and stupidly the fire brigade thought it was ok (despite the hazchem signs that describe how to fight such a fire with water jets) to put foam on the ammonium nitrate. The foam only caused the heat in the AN to build up, and it exploded killing some people.
I know cooling systems is "yo thang" but optimizing a nitric acid generator would be an interesting de-tour to watch. I get the you need heavy cooling for your hyperdrive, but once you get that sorted you'll probably need weapons too (asking nicely doesn't work all that well for pirates, I've heard). While quantum disassembly beams are obviously preferable, some good old fashioned energetic reactions, via rapid decomposition of organic nitrate compounds into a combustible mixture, is always a nice backup to have around when you're in the furthest shrubs of hyperspace.
Glad I waited till the end, was totally going to ask why you didn't just extract and use the urea itself given the tiny difference? Still, we wouldn't have had all this chemistry fun to watch if you had! Great video.
I've always wanted to see if the Birkeland-Eyde process efficiency could be improved using microwave plasma in a beaker instead of an arc. The volume of plasma produced is WAY more than a simple arc, which should improve yield and efficiency. You'd having to get a water cooling and gas circulation tube into the microwave, but otherwise the setup should be pretty straighforward.
I'm pretty sure the deep blue or purple color from letting copper metal react with aqueous ammonia is due to the Tetraammine Copper (II) complex and not the hydroxide directly. Diluting a sample slowly with distilled water will replace the NH3 ligands one by one until there is Tetraaquo Copper (II) complex only and the color will shift to a light blue instead of a diluted purple. (Or I am wrong - its been 20+ years since college...)
This may rely on a separate cooling concept, but, Tech ingredients here on youtube created a refrigeration solution using calcium chloride. I'd be curious to see if the system behaves better with Ammonium nitrate or if this test could be rerun using calcium chloride. Btw, huge fan, keep up the great work!
@hyperspacepirate imagine those "aged urine therapy" Facebook groups after watching this, They ditch the ahLOUminium foil for sheet metal hats "the nerds are onto us"😅
Maybe you can use something like a switchable engine coolant loop to make a 2-bed system. One bed is mixed with water and the coolant flows between that bed and the cold box, while the other bed receives >100°C coolant from a boiler to regenerate it. When the first bed is saturated, trip a solenoid valve to connect that bed to the boiler loop and the second bed to the chilling loop. Repeat ad infinitum
“In this video I’m going to create a refrigeration cycle using my pee. This video is sponsored by square space!” Now that’s a segue I’ll bet they loved.
I think it's funny that youtube didn't demonitized this yet :D Anyway, interesting although somewhat weird project 👍 I'm also looking forward to the video of the vapor absorption cycle! Because that's what's typically used in refrigerators and heat pumps and I always wanted to see a diy-Version of it ^^
I always knew it was technically possible to make ammonium nitrate and laughing gas from pee, electricity, and water, but it's fun to see it done in real life!
@Hyperspace Pirate 3:31 You´ve got that wrong! What actually happens it that the oxygen from the air reacts with the copper to form copper(II) oxide which then dissolves into the ammonia to give a dark blue complex between copper(II) ions and ammonia.
You can increase the efficiency of acid conversion by dissolving the gas in peroxide. Also, I don't think residual acid is what was reacting with the razorblades, as it is a salt with an ionic bond, the disassociation of ions into what little water is left in the matrix is enough to catalyse rusting.
There are some good DIY/OS Designs out there for Birkeland-Eyde Reactors if i remember correctly. Granted i would LOVE to see an optimized and properly documented fully open source type on you could make! Also the people behind that Plasma Toroid project could potentially aid in the Arc Shaping, if that would be of use at this scale. Looking into Bubble Column vs Adsorption Tower may be something as well.
pro tip: run both the acid generator and the ammonia generator simultaneously in the same container. they will neutralize each other in situ, increasing yields somewhat
Try using those solar thermal vacuum tubes to heat your generator for the vapor absorption cycle, and put multiple generators INSIDE the solar tubes. Keep the head fluid level at the same elevation so they all balance and work in parallel.
on thing you can consider, as in colder places it is practically free to do, is concentrating doable using freezing the water, and if you are able to set up something to get just close to freezing(right about 0 c 32 f), with an iron rod colder still brushing the surface for nucleation, you can get sometimes more than half the water to freeze on top. Being cold doesn't stink much, and low physical effort if the weather is cold.
Just so you know, I'm usually pretty hydrated, but that pee sat around for months before I processed it so it changed color.
Check your shower.
@@LocalShowerShitter210what? xD
that's a shitpost @@LocalShowerShitter210
@@coolguy-xd1bg literally
This is really what I was worried about.
Pee based refrigeration is the post apocalyptic instructions I'm looking for
graduated HVAC school a month ago…find me when SHTF…we could make a piss based radiant heating system 😂
If anything at all disrupts the cooling systems to the many, many, many hundreds of nuclear reactors and spent fuel pools, they will go into meltdown and the planet will be radiation sterilized from pole to pole.
No one survives. Not anyone. Everyone dies. And that's that. End of story.
Refrigeration? You won't be needing it as you will be dead from radiation sickness.
My bad. Me fergotz that the preferred term nowadays is "alive-challenged" instead of "dead".
I'm feeling just so socially embarrassed and disgraced at the moment... What a social faux pas on my part!
I feel so stunning and brave to admit to having made a social booboo.
"faux pas "... That's french, you know, for "big booboo".
The movie Greenland was ludicrous. The REAL ending of the movie... everyone in the shelter dying from uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting caused by radiation sickness from all the meltdowns.
@@satanofficial3902 correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Greenland about a comet or asteroid hitting earth, not a "nuclear apocalypse"?
Edit: oh, I get. Me no reed gud
"mom can we get refrigeration cycle?"
mom: "we have refrigeration at home"
**refrigeration at home**
It is a certainty that every chemistry UA-camr eventually decides that they can extract useful chemicals from their pee. What truly sets each apart is when they decide that the value proposition of continuing to collect and process human urine is not worth it. Your limit is 7.5 liters. Impressive
I mean, the first time chemists realized our bodies used the same chemical processes they worked with was when some guy synthesized urea from his pee.
I assume it's because it's literally free. There aren't that many chemicals you have in your home already or get at grocery stores for almost nothing - stuff like water, air, table salt, vinegar - and pee. Of course you can get more at pool stores etc.
You have this sophisticated chemical reactor, might as well use it.
It will turn concerning when a UA-camr finds a use for poop. Or collects their farts for methane.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 Poop is useful for microbiology, and the guy over at Journey Into The Microcosm has already used it for exactly that. I mean your poop is 30% microbes by weight.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 There is black soldier larvae toilets, methan toilets, dry toilets (i use that every day, what an idea to waste dozen of potabilized water to ... shit in...) Then i fertilize my trees with.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 I posted a question on Quora, maybe a year ago asking if fart could be used as energy or something of that sort.
I think I didn't get an answer :(
Imagine you are just sitting in your lawn and then you smell something weird and it turns out your neighbor is boiling pee to build a refrigerator
Yet another Science youtuber I watch has earned the title of "Piss Chemist" If I had a nickel for every time that happened, I'd have 4 nickels, which isnt a lot, but it's weird that it happened 4 times.
Back in the day every chemist was a piss chemistry. Oh how far we have fallen. /s
@@melonfeathercandybat you joke but many of the most important discoveries in chemistry have come from using pee, medicine too.
I remember it like it was yesterday...
Cody pouring jugs of piss in some hay to make black powder...
Good memories!
The primary ingredient in DEF (diesel exhaust fluid) is urea so turning pee into cash might be a viable business model. Also, spraying DEF on your lawn or garden is an easy way of adding nitrogen
Pretty sure with how long it takes to process the urine that there are way more efficient ways to make money, and even as a side hustle it would be so time consuming you wouldn't have time for fun hobbies so it still wouldn't be worth it.
Urea is stupidly cheep like $3 a pound and 1 pound of urea would take about 40lb of pee (assuming 3% and non 100% yield) a human pees about 3lb of pee a day so 14 days a pound so $0.015 an hour
@@jamez6398 The obvious solution is to simply tap into a sewer drain at a location that has a ton of urinals, lmao!
Just pee on your lawn. Stop trying to complicate things.
Sooo... what your saying is, I could pee in my DEF tank?? Instructions unclear! 😅
Always nice to see some new pee chemistry.
If you pee on your wifes feet in the shower it makes bad chemistry
Welcome to the realm of pee chemistry, it's nice to see you here
Pee chemistry is where it's at
The gunk at the bottom of your pee bottle is completely normal. That is a mixture of salts, sugars, phosphorus, skin cells, hormones, smegma, semen, proteins and other volatile compounds. Some medications and metals are excreted via the urine too. I have 3L of mine sitting in my shed, waiting for me to extract the gadolinium in it from when I had an MRI.
You have joined vaunted ranks of science youtubers that have done videos using their own pee.
5:20 - Neighborhood kids come over to ask what the "cool scientist guy" is doing. When he replies, "playing with my urine."
3:32 The blue color of copper solution does not come from the presence copper(II) hydroxide - it is barely soluble in water after all. It would just precipitate out as a kind of blue jello.
What happens here is formation of a copper(II) ammonia complex, or a kind of situation in which electron-rich ammonia molecules surround and bind to the metal ions in solution, forming often colorful, water-soluble complex ions ([Cu(NH3)4(H2O)2]2+). Please compare the color of your solution to something called Schweizer's reagent. It is a solution of copper(II) sulfate in ammonia, and the azure tetraamminecopper(II) ion is present there.
One of the problems with a DIY Birkland-Eyed process is that nitric acid acts like a dissolved gas just like HCl does, not like a liquid like sulfuric acid. Bubbling a large excess of air through the dilute nitric acid you're making quickly approaches diminishing returns. In my experience, you want to reduce the airflow to the a minimum to make the process more efficient.
The same would apply to ammonia, but you're getting a lot more concentrated ammonia with urea/sodium hydroxide and no air.
This is probably stuff you know already but eh... I'm leaving it anyway.
Exactly! there is a sweet spot regarding the power of the arc of his reactor and the airflow so he gets high NOx concentration output but not so little air that the production of the NOx becomes inefficient. Also the acid concentration should not be allowed to rise above 10% due absorption inefficiency issues, its more efficient to make a large volume of low concentration acid and then concentrate it with heat.
@@teresashinkansen9402 He's already using reagents like NaOH so this isn't really "from nothing" He might want to use NaOH in the bubbler to hugely increase the captured NO2. This is what's done in industry to capture nitrogen dioxide. You end up (mostly) with sodium nitrate. I've mad ammonium nitrate by the double displacement reaction of ammonium sulfate with sodium nitrate, concentrating and cooling those two salts causes the ammonium nitrate to crystallize out as it has the lowest solubility.
You can make ammonium sulfate from drain cleaner and the NaOH + urea reaction.
If you really want it to be "sustainable", you can do electrolysis on the sodium sulfate to regenerate the NaOH and H2SO4. It can be incomplete and still work fine.
You have to get a bit clever when you're downsizing industrial processes to lab scales.
Air stones for aquariums don't dissolve air directly into water very well. The bubbles are mainly for surface agitation which allows for much more gas transfer. Look at what the CO2 aquarium people do to efficiently diffuse CO2. Inline atomizers might work better for you
Nice to know ! Is it possible to easy diy it ?
I'm currently in the process of finishing my own Birkeland-Eyde Reactor by fixing the last few leaks in the absorber. Always interesting to see how others do it.
Seriously? Complete with magnetic arc-spreading? I did a crude one years ago without magnetics, just a jacob's ladder arrangement with active cooling inside a reaction flask with recirculated water vapor - a puddle of angry red-yellow liquid collected at the bottom of the flask, probably distilling out as that was the coolest portion of the glass wall.
@@zinckensteel In my current setup I don't have magnetic arc spreading however a stationary, short arc instead of a Jacobs Ladder, wich is much more effective since the arc doesn't restart constantly. I pump air into the glass container I silicon glued onto a tile I drilled holes into. My electrodes don't have active cooling which seems to be fine. Between the reactor chamber and the absorber there are two plastic canisters that allow for Oxidation of the NO, the absorbers consist of a few pvc Parts glued together, the water sits in two long pvc pipes to allow for a longer contact time. The gas is pumped in through an aquarium bubbler that is fed by a hose silicon glued into a drilled pvc cap at the bottom. I have two of these modules and a bucket of base at the end to scrap the leftovers. So I'd say my setup is the intermediate between crude and professional. It's quite simple if you look at it, but it should be more effective than the old "mason jar with a tube leading into a graduated cylinder". Basically it's a neon transformer, an aquarium air pump, a borosilicate container and a tile as the reactor chamber, some pvc hoses, two canisters, some pvc parts and aquarium bubbler stones.
@@zinckensteel Ive found that unless your setup has a power of many KWs with arc currents in the amp range, messing around with arc spreading is just a waste of time and resources, it puts more strain on your power supply and actually lowers yield. Im designing a powerful and efficient system but is difficult to do so because the higher the current the more NOx you get but its a complex play, because for a nice arc stability you benefit from high voltages but you also need high currents which that means more power however if you manage to have a stable arc at the lowest possible voltage most of that power turns into heat, current=heat output from an arc Voltage=arc length and stability.
Practical example: A Neon Sign Transformer outputs 15kV at 30mA that equals about 450W the arc can be drawn as long as about 35 to 40mm while still being stable, the arc looks whitish purple and outputs negligible heat, now compare to the following,
get a iron core 400W metal halide ballast connect it to a bridge rectifier and then put an inductor in series to the output of the bridge rectifier, say a microwave oven transformer primary, now you can draw some very hot arcs about the same length! they have about 2A of current and can melt things yet is the same power as the NST! however the arc is much less stable and does not strike itself if it goes out. The ideal power supply for a B-E reactor should have the capacity to stabilize the arc, to go high voltage low current to strike and stabilize the arc but high current and lower voltage so its hot as possible while maintaining the same power consumption.
I'll try to use platinum spark plug electrodes to improve the yeld. My setup starts with self oscillating generator on 7400 IC and uses automotive ignition coil. Biggest disadvantage of this setup it is REALLY loud.
@@niemam5825 A word on spark plugs: I wouldn't use straight spark plugs, I've heard that they have a quite strong resistor in them which makes them rather unsuitable for this application. I'm by no means literate on the subject, just what I heard. Stainless steel is totally fine. Also, don't use tungsten. You might think "high melting point, must be good" but at these temperatures they oxidize to yellow tungsten oxide powder rather quickly, can be seen in another UA-cam video on the topic from a small channel.
I found DEF to a great source of cheap urea. You can sometimes get it dirt cheap if it's be sitting around for a while... like $1 for a 5 gallon pail.
On the note of this, you can also get it *on tap* (Like Gasoline or Diesel Fuel) at large gas stations and truck stops.
I have been trying to make a birkekand eyde reactor for some time. If you are going to pursue it further, I have a couple tips. When i first started there was almost no production until i slowed down the air flow rate and added a large "oxidation chamber" after the arc chamber to give the gas time to react. The reaction between NO and O2 is relatively slow, and the reaction rate is highly dependent on NO concentration, so a high air flow rate will just blow the unreacted NO out of the system. I managed to get something like 4g per kwh, but i think that my arc setup is far from optimal.
I also had a hard time finding materials that wouldn't corrode in the presence of nitrogen oxides. I recommend poly ethylene. It comes in tubes of many sizes that can be welded together, eliminating the need for hose barbs or selants
I need to say: how You brought in the sponsor and the Hyperspace Pee truck really was funny. Happy New Year!
This is exactly the kind of hard-hitting content I subscribe for.
I always love to see nitric acid production using the arc method. Is really encapsulates a kind of mad scientist steampunk alchemy setup, even when done professionally.
Yes indeed... glass columns with rising bubbles AND electric arcs in a jar... the only thing that could make it more mad-scientist would be if nitric acid was a bit more brightly coloured.
Honey, wake up! A new Hyperspace Pirate video just dropped! 😊
This channel, Tom's channels, and Chemiolis are the ONLY thing keeping me connected to reality instead of submitting to the void of despair that is the dumper fire we call society.
The tanker of Hyperspace Pee did it for me.
Imagine going out to water the plants and your neighbor is just there boiling his own piss
Been there, done that, stunk out the neighborhood.
14:21 Just a small suggestion that worked well for me. When I wanted decent boiling stones made out of glass, I purchased some glass beads and some glass etchant from Amazon (pretty cheap, just a white goop with some HF-like compound in it), and I put the beads in a plastic container with a spoon full of the goop and mixed it around with a spatula.
The glass beads came out _very_ frosted (even more if I left it in for longer or did another cycle), and they worked pretty dang well.
Even boiling things outside, you're going to... piss off... your neighbors. :D
3:50 ? I think the reaction equation is wrongly balanced since you should be getting CO(NH2)2 + 2NaOH --> 2NH3 + Na2CO3, so you get 2 moles of Ammonia per mole of Urea.
Edit: so you should be expecting 2.5 moles or 42.5g of ammonia from 75g of Urea.
You may be right. Im kinda just YEETing my way through this
@@HyperspacePirate That's alright LOL. Keep doing what you're doing, Love you man.
@@HyperspacePirate (it's not an initialism nor an acronym, you need not write it in uppercase)
This was absolutely hilariously unnecessary but made for some unexpectedly great content. Thanks for making the pee fridge, this is the 1st good laugh I’ve had this year.
The jokes always crack me up, but this video was a constant stream of gold.
I'm glad you added the warning not to drink the coffee colored pee to the video. Just might have saved me a trip to the hospital.
When you do pee science and need to collect large amounts I suggest you to freeze it as you collect, that way you don't have to deal with the extremely bad odors of rotten pee and loss of urea/ammonia.
Great video as always. One note: aluminum has a tendency to make that particular nitrate quite sensitive, so heating it in an aluminum can may not be the best idea, especially in a confined space (such as the can with the lid on).
Absolutely love your editing straight to the point, but the animation are really fun and actually teach visually too!❤
This is the number one chemistry channel
"It looks like coffee but don't drink it."
Oh ok I won't then. LOL Dude you're hilarious. I just subbed.
Hyperspace P-rate, bringing the homebrew science.
This is officially the best embedded advertisement I have ever seen. I laughed so hard on the segue into the ad.
FINALLY I’ve been wondering about this for ages!
Old school rv fridges just use concentrated ammonia and water that way everything is done in the liquid phase avoiding the whole solid crystal problem
Those are the Absorption Refrigerators, they use heat typically from the RV’s Propane (although any heat including Concentrated Solar Power, or District Heat can be used) so can be easier than using a PILE of electricity, especially if that is indirectly from the propane.
@@ericlotze7724 True. They work great, even in really hot ambient temperatures. My family had an old 3 way camp fridge in our camper trailer. It could run on propane, 240v AC or 12v DC. Even on 42*C days it would still be able to freeze a can of Coke. They usually will also have a small amount of hydrogen in their refrigerant.
That was definitely in the top three weirdest square space sponsor transitions I've ever... 😂
this is what youtube was intended for: just people looking at a man boiling is pee...
You could recharge it by just letting the water evaporate, but the relatively low critical humidity of ammonium nitrate makes it a bad choice for that. Potassium chloride, potassium nitrate and potassium sulfate don't cool as much, but they have higher critical humidities, meaning they're easier to "recharge" by just passive evaporation, or "fan assisted" evaporation. The biggest advantage of ammonium nitrate compared to the other mentioned salts is it's extreme solubility, you need very little solvent, which is great when you want to achieve a big decrease in temperature and keep the amount of water that has to boiled off each cycle as low as possible. But using a small amount many times to remove a lot of heat kind of makes those advantages negligible.
I've reached a few degrees below freezing, from room temperature using potassium fertilizer, (I don't even remember if it was chloride or nitrate) just by feeding the room temperature water through a counter current heat exchanger. Nothing fancy, just feeding the water slowly through a thin glass tube in a balcony planter with the salt and letting the solution flow back along the glass tube. And by the way, I didn't produce the salt from my own pee, I cheated, I bought a 20 kg bag for maybe the equivalent of $20 a long time ago.
For an ammonia burner you can use the catalyst from a coleman camp heater or brick 1 from an old auto catalyst converter. The auto catalyst works the best.❤
Cover picture is hilarious you had me in stitches..
Our and particularly Hyperspace's NSA agents will be popping off from this lmfao.
great work tho this is my favourite bits of physics and chemistry. i salute you.
Once again dude, As a refrigeration tech i love watching your vids. Ps the humor goes along way too
Got me with the drums at the end. I had a good chuckle.
Honey, don't drink any yellow sodas until I say you can "stores 20 liters of pee in bottles"😂
This videos are very interesting and good.
The idea of making so many useful chemicals from basically free and abundant is really smart and cool
Hope to see more
The idea that someone pitched the idea of a UA-cam video involving someone’s pee as refrigerant to a company and they said “Yes! We’d love to be a partner on this!” …is hilarious.
Shut up you're playing with fire
Wake up bro hypersapce pirate just dropped
Always a crazy interesting video with a soothing jazz vibe in the background. Awesome!
I love that you are harvesting ammonia from your pee. I wish the green energy industry would see ammonia for the superior alternative energy storage it is. If I ever have the time I might try something similar in the future. Thank you.
Ugh....Your intelligence in electronics and chemistry makes me feel like I now need to go read a chemistry textbook. I need to be this smart.
How is it that your channel only has ~200k subscribers???
An interesting cooling system is the ammonia " Icy Ball " cooling system . This is from the 1930's and 40's
You should do a version where you just collect the NH3 gas, compress it to a liquid, and use it to build a refrigeration unit
(with appropriate warnings, but NH3 is how refrigeration used to be done).
In Australia a few years ago, 50 tons of Ammonium Nitrate on a truck was involved in an accident, it was subjected to a smouldering fire, and stupidly the fire brigade thought it was ok (despite the hazchem signs that describe how to fight such a fire with water jets) to put foam on the ammonium nitrate. The foam only caused the heat in the AN to build up, and it exploded killing some people.
Are we all forgetting Lebanon a few years ago?
@@JehuMcSpooran The port of Beirut explosion was colossal, I'm very surprised that he didn't mention that!
I know cooling systems is "yo thang" but optimizing a nitric acid generator would be an interesting de-tour to watch. I get the you need heavy cooling for your hyperdrive, but once you get that sorted you'll probably need weapons too (asking nicely doesn't work all that well for pirates, I've heard). While quantum disassembly beams are obviously preferable, some good old fashioned energetic reactions, via rapid decomposition of organic nitrate compounds into a combustible mixture, is always a nice backup to have around when you're in the furthest shrubs of hyperspace.
no one:
science youtubers: let's use my pee in a video
jk, love ur content!
New king of the piss chemists
Glad I waited till the end, was totally going to ask why you didn't just extract and use the urea itself given the tiny difference? Still, we wouldn't have had all this chemistry fun to watch if you had! Great video.
Love the videos. Best on UA-cam! You, Ave and Cody’s lab are the best
Applied Science and Thought Emporium are the best.
I've always wanted to see if the Birkeland-Eyde process efficiency could be improved using microwave plasma in a beaker instead of an arc. The volume of plasma produced is WAY more than a simple arc, which should improve yield and efficiency. You'd having to get a water cooling and gas circulation tube into the microwave, but otherwise the setup should be pretty straighforward.
hyPEErspace PEErate, strikes again!
very cool video btw
great pee science, glad to see a fellow scholar furthering our research field
I'm pretty sure the deep blue or purple color from letting copper metal react with aqueous ammonia is due to the Tetraammine Copper (II) complex and not the hydroxide directly. Diluting a sample slowly with distilled water will replace the NH3 ligands one by one until there is Tetraaquo Copper (II) complex only and the color will shift to a light blue instead of a diluted purple. (Or I am wrong - its been 20+ years since college...)
Bubbling the N02 right into NH3 (aq) might work slightly better because the equillibrium will be way over to one side. That's a lot of pee
Man this looks even more sciencey than usual
" I don't know if this is normal or if I should see a doctor." Just killed me!
Hilarious and informative. The best sort of youtube content.
This may rely on a separate cooling concept, but, Tech ingredients here on youtube created a refrigeration solution using calcium chloride. I'd be curious to see if the system behaves better with Ammonium nitrate or if this test could be rerun using calcium chloride.
Btw, huge fan, keep up the great work!
@hyperspacepirate
imagine those "aged urine therapy" Facebook groups after watching this,
They ditch the ahLOUminium foil for sheet metal hats
"the nerds are onto us"😅
I see this man has started to venture into the Philosopher's Stone Legend.
Maybe you can use something like a switchable engine coolant loop to make a 2-bed system. One bed is mixed with water and the coolant flows between that bed and the cold box, while the other bed receives >100°C coolant from a boiler to regenerate it. When the first bed is saturated, trip a solenoid valve to connect that bed to the boiler loop and the second bed to the chilling loop. Repeat ad infinitum
If you connect the beds the water vapor from the hot bed would condense in the cold bed
I had no idea you could make nitric acid from air and water. very good video!
“In this video I’m going to create a refrigeration cycle using my pee. This video is sponsored by square space!”
Now that’s a segue I’ll bet they loved.
Its normal. It's dead skin and semen. I experimented with using this is fertilizer, so i went through similar observations. Happy new year.
This is the weirdest video about pee I've never thought I'd watch and not regret afterwards...
And all this for a cold drink xD
I think it's funny that youtube didn't demonitized this yet :D
Anyway, interesting although somewhat weird project
👍
I'm also looking forward to the video of the vapor absorption cycle! Because that's what's typically used in refrigerators and heat pumps and I always wanted to see a diy-Version of it ^^
I always knew it was technically possible to make ammonium nitrate and laughing gas from pee, electricity, and water, but it's fun to see it done in real life!
@Hyperspace Pirate 3:31 You´ve got that wrong! What actually happens it that the oxygen from the air reacts with the copper to form copper(II) oxide which then dissolves into the ammonia to give a dark blue complex between copper(II) ions and ammonia.
I appreciate the middle finger dude. Will continue to support via patreon for that reason alone. Though the science is cool too.
You can increase the efficiency of acid conversion by dissolving the gas in peroxide.
Also, I don't think residual acid is what was reacting with the razorblades, as it is a salt with an ionic bond, the disassociation of ions into what little water is left in the matrix is enough to catalyse rusting.
There are some good DIY/OS Designs out there for Birkeland-Eyde Reactors if i remember correctly.
Granted i would LOVE to see an optimized and properly documented fully open source type on you could make!
Also the people behind that Plasma Toroid project could potentially aid in the Arc Shaping, if that would be of use at this scale.
Looking into Bubble Column vs Adsorption Tower may be something as well.
Now you officially included in club I wade some weird chemical out my own pee club.
Nile Red and Cody's lab are titans OGs of that club😂
pro tip: run both the acid generator and the ammonia generator simultaneously in the same container. they will neutralize each other in situ, increasing yields somewhat
From the title I though our all mighty "piss chemist", aka NileRed uploaded. But the thumbnail was a dead giveaway that it was you. :D
Love the science and humor! thank you sir
I can smell this video through this screen
I actually cannot wait for the next video
When life gives you pee, make air conditioning.
Try using those solar thermal vacuum tubes to heat your generator for the vapor absorption cycle, and put multiple generators INSIDE the solar tubes. Keep the head fluid level at the same elevation so they all balance and work in parallel.
on thing you can consider, as in colder places it is practically free to do, is concentrating doable using freezing the water, and if you are able to set up something to get just close to freezing(right about 0 c 32 f), with an iron rod colder still brushing the surface for nucleation, you can get sometimes more than half the water to freeze on top. Being cold doesn't stink much, and low physical effort if the weather is cold.
I don't understand what you are trying to say 😢
I too have considered breaking into to healing crystal market.
I was expectin you to laugh histerically in the pocess of burning the amonium nitrate. 😅
Congratulations on you admission into the very select club of the piss chemists! Great video also!
That part in every chemistry youtubers career when they start collecting their own urine.