What are Super Acids? (Super Acid Lore)
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- Опубліковано 3 чер 2024
- Super acids are extremely strong acids, so strong that they get their own special designation. Are you a registered super acid?
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Just for your own knowledge, fluoroantimonic acid is a component in some photoresists. We don't use a lot of it, obviously, because the stuff is horrifying. But if you want a really good masking job with some pretty solid etching, there's no better game in town.
The things we do to make our silly little transistors
how do you resist the urge to take a sip?
All of these horrible terrible chemicals to make a poison sand chip that's probably gonna be used by a kid to play WOW.
@@wewillrockyou1986 the exact reason I opted to work in energy conversion and storage rather than keep pursuing chip fabrication.
@@FleshWizard69420 I really wish I had an answer for you. Somehow my intrusive thoughts never won.
My untrained takeaway from this is that the Large Hadron Collider is the world's most powerful acid when firing protons
wait, you might be onto something, how much PH would the LHC have if it was an acid?
@@user-oq8ie2wv7zpH would mean that you've dissolved it in aqueous solution. It's pKa you mean
Sorry, How much pKa would the LHC have if it was an acid?
The Acid Beam lmao
Also
@@user-oq8ie2wv7z the energy of the physical impact of the hydrogen would dominate any interaction, meaning that the things observed would not be categorized as a reaction with acid.
I’m not especially well trained in physics or chemistry, though, so somebody please peer-review my analysis lol
@@user-oq8ie2wv7za lot
When Sulfuric acid is one of the weak kids on the block you know it's a scary list
More like old-eum
☠️🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷
Good one buddy
Accurate.
Damn I wanted to say that
@@trygaming7920🇱🇷🇲🇾🇵🇷murica
New phobia unlocked: Surprise protonation by super acid when you don't want to be protonated
im gonna protonate you
GET PROTONATED GET PROTONATED GET PROTONATED
@@randominternetpersonwastaken w-what are you doing step-acid?
protonation @@CaesarShadowKnight
@@randominternetpersonwastaken That's my favorite schwarzenegger quote
Learning that the PH scale is logarithmic really changes how you look at acidity
Would you mind expanding on this?
@@citrus4419they scale exponentially
Mols
@@citrus4419 The pH scale is logarithmic, meaning that an increase or decrease of an integer value changes the concentration by a tenfold. For example, a pH of 3 is ten times more acidic than a pH of 4. Likewise, a pH of 3 is one hundred times more acidic than a pH of 5. Similarly a pH of 11 is ten times more basic than a pH of 10.
HUH
This is what makes acids so fun to talk about and SO TERRIFYING!!!
Fluoroantimonic acid is 20 QUINTILLION times stronger than 100% sulfuric acid. It’s wild. You do not want to mess with any of these!
Nothing like a cold drink on a hot summer day 🥰
How does that even work? Would it take 20 QUINTILLION times less quantity of flouroantimonic acid than sulphuric acid to make stuff go sour? That doesn't sound right at all
its trillion not quintillion :o
@@sv98753 or in technical terns -- a butt load
@@superioropinion7116 Well, not quite. The measure of acidity is just a measure of how much the acid prefers being the acid form or the anion form. It is usually measured in water, though this has applicability to other solvents. If we assume you add a small amount of the acid to neutral water, then the Ka is simply the ratio of [h+] to [acid] in the resulting solution(and the pKa is the log of that). This means it still takes the same quantity of a super acid to donate a given amount of h+ as a normal acid. So the strength difference is not measuring how much 1 unit of acid changes the acidity of water, its more a measure of how capable it is of doing acid things in suboptimal environments(such as in already acidic solutions, or inert solvents, or short time windows)
The storngest acid is those sour gum balls..
I used to get that shit for cheap and just eat them so much that my mouth would melt.
Wait until you get the stuff behind the trees being sold by the local haired guy 😁
@@FleshWizard69420 😵💫
That's malic acid
Chemists: "Protonating" "Oxidizing" etc. What it really is, for example for piranha solution: "Hey! You! Organic molecule! Eat this Proton! Eat that oxygen!" It's basically a bully throwing protons (H+) and oxygen at any organic molecule until it gets completely ripped apart into only CO2 and Water. So you can throw most organic molecules/substances into piranha solution (not even a super acid) and it gets protons and oxygen fired at until it completely degrades to carbon dioxide and water. Nothing, really nothing gets left of it. The CO2 bubbles out and the water slightly dilures the already aqueous piranha solution. Absolutely amazing to witness this chemical madness 😅
Periodic Videos has a video where they dissolve half a chicken leg in piranha solution. Absolutely terrifying.
Peroxymonosulfuric acid
As a chemistry idiot, this explanation is actually really helpful!
breaking bad body disposal method
@@Kordikk696they used HF, not piranha. A small and pointless nitpick
I work with a lot of acids and explosive catalysts. We keep large amounts in refrigerated outdoor bunkers. About 750 ft away from the building. A few of them will spontaneously combust and/or explode when they reach 50 degrees F. It's absolutely terrifying moving these material inside. We've only had one bunker explode due to a temperature probe failure combined with a refrigeration failure. I'm told the fireball was magnificent. The safety team was happy because the facility is rated at an 8 mile blast radius and that theory luckily wasn't tested that day.
"We've only had one bunker explode" if that's considered decent, what's the average on mediocre facilities?
@@mistaowickkuh6249if no one counts, it's always 0
That sounds like it might be time for either a career change or a really, really good life insurance policy, lol.
Welcome in chemical industry😂
@@mistaowickkuh6249 The USCSB channel has the answer to that question.
It's so acidic it can protonate hydrogen...
Well, I've learnt something scary today.
Carbon in CH5+ is not pentavalent since the bond between two of the hydrogens and the carbon becomes a three-center two-electron bond. So you are kinda protonating the bond between the carbon and the hydrogen, which I find even more interesting
Oh jesus i want to see a visualization of orbitals of this madness.
Thank you. I was like but... there is NO BOND for that! This helps explain the madness
A similar thing happens in carborane acid as far as I know
Cool! Just like diborane.
@@empireempire3545yes please
I've been an HVAC technician for over 20 years now, I used to use HF to clean condenser coils, one day my father decided that this jug in my truck looked like window cleaner, as it was in a 1 gallon plastic container and it was dyed blue. So he went ahead and washed his windshield, and wouldn't ya know it, about a week or so later it was opaque😂😂😂
he’s lucky he didn’t die. That stuff goes right through your skin and you don’t even feel it as it does so. By that point it’s pretty much already too late
Also, what kind of plastic were you keeping it in? HF requires special containers
Probably the factory jug
@@the_expidition427 Probably
I assume it took a week because it had to migrate through the plastic coating?
@@tsm688 perhaps it was also rather dilute?
Honorable mention -the hydrogen isotope tritium is radioactive and undergoes beta decay decay forming a helium ion. If it was in the form of a gas beforehand, this will form a helium hydride ion HeH+ :a superacid with a theoretical pka of -63.
This protonates basically anything, stuff like oxygen or hydrogen even
My biochemist ass made it to "protonating sulfuric acid" and I lost my shit tbh. I'm gonna have a drink and finish this video later.
Well, in anhydrous or close to it conditions sulphuric acid can protonate itself and dissociate in to ions, simularly to water, ammonia and other polar, protic solvents. All this to say, it isn't really that exotic of a property.
@@ricardsjaunzems2364
Yeah I'm a biochemist, "anhydrous" may as well mean "in another dimension" to me.
Perchloric acid should be the one called boomer acid
because it makes things go boom
A little surprised you didn't mention anhydrous HF, as it self ionizes into bifluoride (HF2-) anions and the highly protonating H2F+ cation, making it substantially more acidic than H2SO4's Hammett acidity function (hereafter H0) of ~-12 with anhydrous HF being -15 - nothing like its weak acidity in aqueous solution. Though much like with water and ammonia autoprotolysis does weird things to certain acidity functions, and for the superacids here with HF in them HF is... technically acting as a base.
Also, IIRC the sulfuric acid definition of superacid sets the cutoff at H0 = -12 defined by pure anhydrous sulfuric acid, but pure anhydrous sulfuric acid doesn't actually exist because the pure form is in equilibrium with several species that INCLUDE water at a low concentration - pure H2SO4 slightly dilutes itself into an aqueous solution simply by existing.
Of course if we're including protonating ions we'd be remiss to exclude the venerable (because it was one of the first compounds formed in the universe) and friendly (this is a lie) helonium, with very cool formula of "HeH+" and its very normal H0 of -63. Yes, that's 10^51, or one sexdecillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more acidic than 'pure' (see above) H2SO4.
Was acidity a mistake?
No, it's the chemicals that are wrong.
Heh...
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about but imma give you a thumbs up for effort!👍
Back in the day chemists used a lot of anhydrous HF in analytical work. Over the years the uses dropped substantially, just like perchloric acid. As a safety guy, I was relieved! Perchloric acid would just rip you to pieces in an explosion, any hospital could try to put you back together. Anhydrous HF exposure was another matter, it required a hospital that could administer nebulized calcium gluconate, it was my job to make sure that the local hospital had this capability. Never had to use it, fortunately.
That moment when something written like "heh" is what I'm going to assume is one of if not *the* most acidic substances EVER
I think this would win the ultimate yikes award (for stupidity), being a science lab story from when i was in middle school. It was years ago, so some details are a little fuzzy.
We were in a morning lab class, getting to use the bunsen burners to heat up test tubes for... some reaction, which is unimportant. The important part is, one of my classmates had the genious idea to heat up a pair of metal tongs with the open flame of the bunsen burner, and then use them to grab another of my classmates' necks from behind. The victim was left with burns that i think scarred over, and our resident 'genious' earned himself a few days of in school suspension.
Sounds like some of my old classmates , except they would be branding each other like it was Jackass , the Early Years .
@@kaboom4679 this was post 2000, i should add
@@kaboom4679I got a couple of brands from back in the day being stupid..,
but to just come up behind someone and shove hot metal on their neck, that's Fluropsychotic!
Why so some people find that funny‽
why only a few days suspension? you try that shit in real life you'll get jail and restraining orders.
@@tsm688 yeah, that school was quite 'special' at times
13:08 That hydrogen was so badly bullied by the π electrons of that cyclopentadiene that it left and bound to the nitrogen.
Some of these diagrams look vaguely like biblically accurate angels, and yes i am afraid
As a metal plater, sulfuric scares me. Considering for the process we’re using we dip the parts in 10 gallons 93% sulfuric/70 gallon water mix and then into a bath with 8 gallons 39% Hydrogen peroxide/10 gallons of another proprietary chemical blend/60 gallons water.
So very very close to making a GNARLY piranha solution.
Then mixtures of 100% nitric, 93% sulfuric, and ammonium bifluoride.
Gosh chemistry is neat.
Perchloric acid has also been used , and , inevitably caused some complications .
What metal are you plating? Especially with that last concoction you mentioned...
@@petevenuti7355that’s just what we use to clean aluminum before we put a number of coatings on.
you are the reason I'm deciding to minor in chemistry as a music major! we'll see how that goes lol
I almost did a music minor but they tried to make me do live stuff which I had no interest in doing - I love music
@That_Chemist soooooo many chemists, including myself, at my university either doubled, wanted to double, minored, or wanted to minor in music. It was insane. Even the department head started with music, but the Chem building was next to the music building, so he was coaxed in decades ago.
@@thecountrychemist2561 honestly, music and chemistry are both a form of science! haha
Sonochemistry
@@thecountrychemist2561 It's the same with physicists! A bunch of us are photographers too, though not as many as are musicians. There is obviously a kind of connection between music and the physical/chemical sciences, at least in the people that study them. I wonder if it's the same for engineering and biology?
Triflic acid is super important to peptide chemistry! Its the only acid we have that is strong enough to remove some cysteine protecting groups that arent removed by TFA. It is vital to the chemical synthesis of insulin!
TFA is trifluoroacetic acid tho
@That_Chemist correct, but let me clarify. Peptide chemistry usually involves final treatment with TFA to cleave the peptide from resin and remove all acid labile protecting groups. But for the synthesis of peptides with many many disfulfide bridges (insulin has 3) we need many orthogonal protecting groups. Protecting groups like adamantyl aren't removed by TFA but are removed by TFMSA/triflic, so we can selectively deprotect and ensure disulfides form in the correct order.
I couldn't imagine being insulin-dependent.. almost everything I do has a DIY option, it might not always be the best or cheapest option but it's an option. Making insulin sounds like it something well beyond anything I could even attempt!
@petevenuti7355 to be clear you would only make insulin this way if you wanted to do some complicated modifications, it's far cheaper and more abundant to make insulin recombinantly
@@sirdeadless yeah right, for now my lab ain't clean enough for that... ,
Like even my bread mold is getting contaminated....
What the actual hell is that cubane type acid? "Carborane" Nah that's HP Minecraft 💀
'HP Minecraft' 😂
HP Minecraft 🤣
Actually the least scary molecule on this list
Less cubane and more dodecahedrane. Perfect gift for loved ones who are the intersection of chemists and DnD nerds.
Put that Fluoroboric Acid in F tier! A "kinder gentler" super acid is like a kinder gentler machine gun. Perchloric needs to be A tier, because it was in "10 Clover Field Lane" and I wont spoil it but Perchloric did a really good job and deserved an Oscar Nomination for their outstanding work. Really, Perchloric deserved the statue, but Hollywood is so anti-chemical it would never happen.
I work with fluoroboric acid every day. It’s used to “activate the surface of low alloy steel to prepare it for titanium cadmium alloy plating. I’ve gotten it on my skin a few times and it doesn’t bother too much (I don’t let it sit on my skin as I wash it off immediately) how in danger am I to be exposed to it?
I promise I’m not trying to be a smart ass or anything, I’m just not that smart and I’ve been getting paranoid about all the chemicals I’m exposed to on the daily.
The highlighted H on the carborane acid is not the acidic one- the cluster "HCB11Cl11" is anionic. The super acid is [H+][CHB11Cl11-], where each boron has a chlorine and the carbon has a hydrogen. The acidic proton is the counterion H+. [Cs][CHB11Cl11], and the parent cluster [Cs][CB11H12] are not acidic.
It would be even stronger if we could replace that hydrogen with a chlorine, or even better, replace them all with flourine atoms but so far no-one was successfull at making that.
i worked with this very anxious girl in 1st year who didn't want to touch the acids and kinda just watched me doing the experiments (which i didn't mind because i had a huge crush on her) until one day were i explained to her that the 0.1mol HCl we were working with is weaker than stomach acid and "that's inside you all the time so you'll be fine with this" with her new found confidence she takes the bottle, and completely misses the beaker spilling it all over her eczema covered hand
i got backhanded that day
she didn't wear gloves because she usually didn't do the experiments
Did you at least get a date?
@@petevenuti7355 no i tried to kms and got kicked out for not doing the exams
That's unfortunate but it wasn't your fault really, if she had a medical condition like this she should've been wearing gloves regardless. Plus if someone is scared of working with 0.1M HCl then idk how they'd deal with having to handle concentrated acids later down the line...I'm not trying to be mean or anything tho
Now you need to do the super caustic substances tier list and the pH neutral substances list.
I know Oleum is used to make spicy toulene. The first 2 nitrations can be done with just a mix of 2 common acids, but the third needs a little extra help from sulphur trioxide. Funny thing is that I knew the recipe long before I figured out what this "oleum" thing was..😂
9:43 For anyone wondering, pKa scale is really intuitive in terms of energy, or in case of electrochemisty, voltage.
i have a cool story from high school. We were preparing some easy experiments to show at open day, such as chemical stoplight, methylene blue color change and Tollens reagent. While we were setting up the Tollens reagent, the teacher went under the fumehood and started pouring 30% ammonia in a beaker, which was needed for the experiment. For reasons i still don't quite get today, while he was surprised about not being able to pick up the smell cause the fumehood worked fine, he decided to lift the beaker and take a big sniff inside of it. Ammonia isn't that great smelling while concentrated so i have no idea how that could've felt. What i know is that a second later he was falling on the ground and we managed to help him to sit down. He stayed with his head on the desk for like 10 minutes and we were starting to get worried that we needed to call for help. Luckily he didn't sustain any damage and despite him dropping the beaker violently out of shock, nobody was hurt and there was no significant damage to the lab. He asked us to please not tell people about it, so it obviously became a huge meme among our class. One guy also wrote a report about it and gave it to the Italian teacher to read out. I rarely ever laughed that much again.
I felt those acid dropping mouth noises in my soul. Damn.
It's a sizzle fer shizzle.
When it comes to superacids I feel like there's a gap between lab chemistry and industrial chemistry that would be helpful to bridge, if you know enough to comment when applicable. HF and H2SO4 are used at refineries to protonate alkenes. I think that's one of those millions-of-tons per year processes that underpin high material standards of living. It's one of the least niche uses of chemistry out there, and I wish I understood that big-picture stuff better.
operate an hf alkylation unit. pretty neat.
Have an old friend who works in silicon manufacture & etching, and he once casually mentioned he works with HF.. I asked him what it’s like to work with and his utter aloofness clued me in that his only knowledge of its strength was the safety procedures. Don’t get me wrong, he knew the safety procedures inside and out taking due diligence, but he did go into work the next day, mentioned our convo to his manager and asked if he could dissolve some glass boiling granules for me.. the mofo said yes. So I received a Snapchat the next day of him giggling dissolving some ultra fine glass and silicon oxide waste in his break lmao
you should share the story and photos in the story submissions channel in the TC discord!
I was a pipefitter in a DuPont plant in LaPorte Tx where they made sulfuric acid, turned it into oleum, then used the oleum mixed with flouro spar and steam and created HF...and then Flourosulfuric..maybe.
Whenever we worked on those pipes we were in full acid suits. Even with the suit, getting them on you burned like hell. On bare skin, instant scaring.
An actual way to create a pentavalent carbon. The most well guarded secret of chemistry. I hope they won't make you disappear for putting out this video.
"A lot of the time you'll have safety training to tell you specifically not to work with perchloric acid, and that is because it explodes stuff."
Now I wanna work with it and make stuff explode...
I think you actually should go over the Hammett acidity function since pKa starts to become meaningless with superacids and are just based on estimations anyway using a comparison with a different solvent. In addition, since the definition of superacid uses the Hammett function instead of aqueous pKa, it actually means that HF is both a weak acid and a superacid using the definitions of those two terms.
As a glycobiologist I had a similar experience with triflic acid, sound included. I had to put my glycoprotein solutions in a dry ice bath because, as you put, it's very exothermic (I prefer my labmate's phrasing: "it's exothermic as f***")
Dont know why, but this is one of the best videos you've made. You've come a long way with the production value!
I thought most bases had the OH group and acids had just H (other than COOH). Chemistrys only rule is that there's always an exception to the rule I guess
The yellow color-coded H is that H you’re talking about. Acids “donate” that proton (hydrogen) to other molecules. I’m drunk and not a chemist, but that’s my very basic understanding of it.
@@Sniperboy5551 yea it's just weird seeing an OH with the H being the acid. I tend to think about the molecules in groups, like H group and OH group sticking off the molecule for which is acid and which is base, but I guess that's probably my issue with understanding this completely
Enjoy the alcohol friend
the closer you look, the less simple rules like this one hold. It may be a useful enough approximation for inorganic acids but I’d say for the majority of organic acids, the acidic H is bound to an oxygen. if you want to learn more, i would suggested reading about the different definitions of acids and bases include Lewis, Brønsted-Lowry and Arrhenius. for a winemaker like yourself tartaric acid may be a familiar organic acid, and it has 4 -OH groups, 2 of which can be deprotonated (made to give up an H+ in the presence of a base that receives it)
@@Sniperboy5551very acidic understanding"
@@mrwinemakerthings with OH groups are acidic (especially with adjacent double bonded oxygens) because the oxygen is fairly good at holding a negative charge. When an acid donates H+ a negative charge is left behind and a negative charge on an oxygen is much more stable than a charge on a carbon.
Love seeing all the quality improvements!!!
When I got my old job in the mining industry a couple years ago we still had a couple methods using perchloric acid, fun stuff. We actually phased it out while I was there just using more sulfuric and concentrated peroxide
Please keep using the frog, it’s so demented I love it
Damn, perchloric acid is scary, but is still used in fabricating metal parts as a polishing agent, as well as for etching. I would ask for a pay raise if I worked with that on an industrial scale.
I use it pretty often in sub 1L amounts. It's not too scary if it's the azeotropic kind at around 70%. Does cool stuff with lots of compounds. Mostly makes them explosive.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 Yeah, what you call cool is what I call scary.
@@nicholasneyhart396 it's my area of study
FYI, in the diamond industry HClO4 perc is syringed into Paar bombs (PTFE lined), ~150degC, ~2hrs, with a 5-45ct gem diamond, that has a black pit or fissure (carbon, mineral). the gem with black line is worth nothing. the black removed (and sometimes glass filled) it's worth $$$$. not bad for 2hrs, 10cc of perc. and oh yes, risking a chemist! ;) that's what chemists are for (I'm a chem eng)
They would probably mention it before you took the job, unless they were some sort of unscrupulous employers, so you would know what you were signing up for and wouldn't be entitled to a pay rise.
Thanks for the tips to dissolve the body of my victim of my murder
trust me if you use HF there's gonna be 2 bodies dissolving
Strong Bases are more effective at dissolving bodies though.
0:10 Ah, the "which you wouldn't typically think of" qualifier.
Also seen in hyper-oxygenating compounds like FOOF and other devil accelerants.
6:40 THERE we are. The acid-oxidizer combo!
I watched this video yesterday and happened to receive an email from my undergraduate research advisor the same day outlining a procedure we followed today. Imagine my shock when I saw pure triflic acid! It was only a couple mL, and we handled it safely in a fume hood, but I will say that I am not "well-trained" to handle such materials as this video suggested.
I would recommend that you have a postdoc supervise you while working with it, and get them to show you how they would handle it
Great video, i for one would like just a tad bit more leymans explanation for why some of these are so dangerous (the story about the caps is a good example).
Im not a chemist so idk why a bunch of flourine atoms in a molecule is so scary to you guys or why certain bonds make you gasp, same with the nerve agent vid. Otherwise, great videos dude ❤
Perchloric acid in anhydrous acetic acid is a standard reagent in analitical chemisty 😅
I used to work in the synthesis department of a pharma company and seeing analytical chemists borrowing perchloric acid from our lab always scared the crap out of me, as it was the only chemical in our cabinet that I just wasn’t willing to work with
Having worked with it , I can say it isn't quite as scary , at least as the azeotrope or in more dilute concentrations .
However , the stuff beyond 70% commands my full respect , as does any compound that can turn most anything it contacts into a high explosive or at least , an unintended pyrotechnic device .
Imagine the old days , with wooden benches and floors , having years worth of accumulated perchloric acid exposure , just waiting for a a kiss of the Bunsen burner , or , a dropped flask or mortar and pestle .
Been watching your videos since a few days now and find them super enjoyable to watch even though my chemistry knowlegde doesn't go further than Ions
I'm glad you enjoy them - I hope they continue to be entertaining :)
Keep it coming brother, these are top tier.
I really appreciate the explanations for why some of the more exotic structures are acidic, like the low electron density in the carbon acids.
I always wondered what made acid. Great video!
You know it's gonna be a crazy tier list when *sulfuric acid* is just D tier
My only chemistry knowledge is "layman" based on 10th grade (which was long time ago). I still loved this video. A lot the references went over my head (which is rare in a science context), but your commentary and vocal inflections CLEARLY let me know that some of these things are freaking dangerous 😂. Love it.
I would love to see a tier list on superbases
Coming soon!
DMT is my favorite "super acid"
😉
Preach it, dude ✌️
Machine elves are proud of you
...I'm partial to aqua-regia myself...,.
I smoke fat DMT blunts every day right before work. Great way to start the day
I love super acids! I did a bare bones basic overview paper on them for my Inorganic Chem's final paper. Weird and horrifying are the best adjectives for them!
Yeah anytime HF is mentioned my body has a pavlovian response. Microelectronics lab here and while we work with a whole lot of different acids and solutions, the one that is always labelled with big prominent stickers on every machine that uses it and we don't fuck with ever is HF. That stuff is terrifying.
I once tried storing my triflic acid in a vial with a rubber septum cap on to seal it. Later I found a nasty rubber goo instead of a nice liquid and the septum sealing was totally destroyed.
Christopher Reed had an UNDERGRAD make the fluorinated carborane acid, which needs HF/F2 to make. I think they published it in Angewandte.
Quick correction: The CH you highlight on the carborane acid isn't the acidic one - what you drew is the just the anion itself. The proton of carborane acid jumps between the eleven thoroughly-uninterested chloro groups in solution and forms a hydrogen bonding polymer in the solid state.
Still, love your tier list and agree with it 100%.
One of the few of these I, a non-chemist, have heard about is perchloric acid. Specifically from John D. Clark's "Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants". An excellent book as Clark is an excellent storyteller. The amount of nasty chemicals they worked with in early liquid rocketry is staggering.
Derek Lowe's blogs are also amazing reads for "interesting" chemicals.
I was fixing a pipe at a steel mill and was near a slag shoot, it missed the bin and hit a bucket of airing off hydrochloric acid and splashed. In slow motion I watched a single drop hit my finger. Almost painless, it smoked for a second and left a scar.
That does not compute.
As a chemist, I have had the occasional spill of 35-36% Hydrochloric acid on my hands. It does not fume, burn or do anything else unless you let it sit there. Plenty of time to calmly walk to the sink and wash your hands.
I work occasionally with fluoroboric acid doing MAAD because it is generally safer to handle than HF so we "neutralize" HF by adding a bunch of boric acid, also helps with solubility of some metals since fluorides can be pretty non-soluble but the excess borane afaik pulls the fluorine off of the metals.
My lab partner and I once cleaned up for someone who left us a sour analysis of halides (including fluoride) in a test tube. As my partner took it with his bare hands everything poured out at the bottom because the glass got disolved by HF, and luckily I saw it and told him to drop it instantly, since it's known to be deadly by just a few drops onto the skin lol
You should do a "scary substances I haven't worked with" tierlist
I don't know crap about chemistry and I'm also failing my class however this dude makes it interesting
Not me thinking this video was about some really dope LSD.
11:55 The hydrogen on the carbon of the carborane cage isn't labile. That entire molecule is the anion, and representations usually omit the acidic proton since it doesn't associate strongly with any particular part of the molecule; it tenuously coordinates with the chlorine atoms in the solid phase of the one you show but other carboranes with different substituents on the boron atoms will have even more labile bonding with the proton. I remember reading some papers a few years back about efforts to synthesize carborane anions with -F and -CF3 substitution on the carbon atom, which is apparently difficult to do, in the hopes of further pushing how poorly coordinating the anions can get.
I love the carborane molecule...it's beautiful to me. I'm not at all a chemist but I feel like the center of the molecule could be used to trap a troublesome molecule or atom.
They do that with fullerenes! You can have Xe@C60 where xenon is inside of it, for example
An icosohedron, or a d20 as we nerds say ;)
With HSbF6 you can complete the alkilation of benzene with CH4 in one step. Basicly it is a super catalyst.
Anything that can protonate methane should be called a super duper acid
Super acids are often studied by people who are given grants to study super acids. Sounds obvious, right? Even That Chemist said it. But think about it this way.
They're job is literally to invent more work for themselves.
could you do a tier list of compounds containing platonic solids? i just really like how they look
The pKa of sulfuric acid in water is -2.8 and not 2.8 as you stated.
Yeah the first time I had to work with triflic acid (distilling several grams, FFS) I asked the guy who used to do the reaction if I could pull it up with a syringe and he was like "yeah sure".
So I did, and 1 minute later I noticed drops dripping down my sleeve.
Luckily it was winter, so the acid had to burn through the thick gloves, the lab coat and my thick sweater, so I had enough time to realize what was going on and throw it away.
I was unscathed, but my clothes were completely ruined.
Fast forward to an year later, and I had to do the same reaction again, but we didn't have enough acid.
So I went to borrow it from another group.
The guy pulled out the bottle, and started to pour it in a plastic vial whilst wearing thin gloves. I was like "dude NO! Just give the whole bottle, it's safer"
Very dangerous how almost everyone I met underestimated it.
Nice! Never heard about a few of those
Love triflic acid. Legit saved my ass during PhD
I learned so much scary new information today... thank you
Superacid generators are really prevalent in polymerization reactions to propagate the reaction by cations. Really cool stuff
Ah yes, chemistry, i shall watch and pretend to understand
Imagine combining some of these different super-acids to make a hyper-acid or an ultra-acid.
Also surprised you didn't mention piranha solution.
Ksssh! Woosh! Frr-krsh! Are the best chemistry sounds. At least when it's someone else mixing, preferably in a different room/building/hemisphere.
Did the Briggs Rauscher reaction as a lab project and had to work with perchloric acid. Thankfully only like 5ml and not heated either but my teacher poured it into the measuring thing for me with neoprene gloves. The data sheet sure scared me though.
Just winterized a customer's pool today. Their copper heat exchanger was gushing. I'm pretty sure their water would have made this list- pH indicator was off the scale yellow (very acidic) with 20+ ppm free chlorine ☠
-20 pka is the most cursed thing ever, I went deaf hearing him say it.
I've worked with a guy, who had to use pyridine HF
So he poured it into a glass three neck rbf and half of it literally dissolved and a dropping funnel was stuck in a neck of that rbf so the upper part looked like some sort of a champion cup
Talking about perchloric acid... I always love seeing the crystals all over the molecular sieve on the bottle of 0.1 M perchloric acid solution in acetic acid to keep it dry... XD "Please don't explode in my face, thaaaank you!" xD
Super acids are amazing for chemistry, but always remember, as soon as there's water around them, they get buffered to H3O+ strenght and become useless and boring.
you should do a video tasting various acids, adjusted to the same sourness
I handled pure sulphuric acid in secondary 3... It have a oily aspect by it's high viscosity.
"yeet molecules apart" - a fantastic description
Thanks, those drinks in S tier were awesome, great taste!
Hey, remember me? I am the guy that worked with kg amounts of triflic. may i say? i am super well trained lol. been on your discord now quite some time, mostly hang out in the homemade chem channel since i no longer work in the industry ^^
On the movie "Alien", the alien's saliva would easily eat holes through the decks of the space ship.
Maybe there was a super acid in his saliva. 😆
Another one. Gosh. What have we done to deserve this 😍
you must be sharing it with friends who would enjoy it ;)
the longer i looked at some of the compounds the more i started laughing nervously
For some godforsaken reason our University decided to have us use triflic acid and HPF6 in our fifth semester inorganic lab. That made for extremely stressful weeks and I attribute it greatly to pushing me from experimental work into theoretical chemistry
The cocktail gon be hitting hard after replacing lemons with some of these bad bois
Perchloric even needs its own fume hood that gets cleaned regularly, because the fumes will make explosive perchlorare salts in tbe ductwork- and eventually your fume hood will spontaneously explode.