In this video I mix up some of the hotter and faster burning versions of thermite, as well as some unique ones that use reactive alkali metals. I also go into the chemistry a bit to put some numbers behind the energy and reactivity of the various thermites. Don't try any of this at home! Some more notes on the thermites I used in the vid: My thermites all burned fairly quickly because I used finely powdered chemicals. If I would have used coarser particle size, the mix would burn slower and I may have been able to recover some more of the metals generated. It was hard to capture the brightness of the reactions in this video. Thermites generally release large amounts of UV due to the very high flame temps, and also extreme amounts of white light. Never stare directly at burning thermite! Feel free to comment with suggestions for future videos! I like to hear from my viewers! :) instagram: https://www.instagram.com/styro.drake/ EDIT: I see that some people are confused on why I say that lithium is the king of reactivity when compared to the other alkali metals. Here is the explanation I typed up for a viewer: I was hoping somebody would bring this up because it deals with a very important concept in chemistry! If you throw each of the alkali metals in water, it is clear that lithium reacts the slowest of the group. Let's compare lithium and sodium as a specific example. If you do the thermo calculations for throwing each into water, you see that lithium releases more energy than sodium, both by mass AND by mole! Furthermore, Gibbs free energy change is more negative for LiOH formation than NaOH, in both the aqueous and solid phases. Because ∆G=-RTlnK, this suggests Li reacts more so with water than sodium. So why the hell does sodium clearly react more violently with water? It turns out that a reaction's energy release does not directly imply anything about how fast that reaction will occur, and this is an extremely important rule in the nature of chemicals. There are plenty of factors that play a role here. Sodium has a lower melting point than lithium, so it can melt on water and increase surface area for reaction. Furthermore, sodium has a lower ionization energy, which makes it easier for the reaction with water to initiate.

• published: 15 Jun 2016
• views: 1293384