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So an odd question that's been kicking around in my head lately: Are there any good examples of a relatively common substance or reaction that absolutely cannot be done with glassware (not just for thermal reasons)? Glass seems like such a stable and stalwart substance for chemistry, but I'm curious what sorts of horrifying - or perhaps perfectly sane - things would either destroy or consume the typical laboratory flask.
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Apr 18, 2016 17:32
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Hydrofluoric Acid will gladly eat all your favourite glassware. And then poison you and dissolve your bones, because of course it will.
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Apr 18, 2016 17:38
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Segmentation Fox posted:So an odd question that's been kicking around in my head lately: A bit of a stretch from "perfectly sane", but molten sodium hydroxide will swiss-cheese glass in a heartbeat. It's easily attainable, only ~ 600F. A good hotplate or bunsen burner will handily reach that.
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Apr 18, 2016 17:54
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Note that all chemistry glassware is made from borosilicate glass (Duran, or another brand) which is quite a bit sturdier than regular kitchenware. And also 10x as expensive.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:00
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Any alkaline solution can slowly dissolve glass. Long-term storage of hydroxide solutions needs to be done in plastic bottles. Glass bottles with alkalis in them slowly frost up due to corrosion of the inner surface. It can be a significant source of contamination in some situations. Superheated steam will also corrode glass. Gauges on old boilers are usually clouded up due to it.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:09
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Carbon dioxide posted:Note that all chemistry glassware is made from borosilicate glass (Duran, or another brand) which is quite a bit sturdier than regular kitchenware. And also 10x as expensive. Pyrex kitchenware used to be made from borosilicate glass, too. Until they sold the name off and now it's just regular crappy soda-lime glass.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:23
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I have been enlightened. Thanks for sating my curiosity folks.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:23
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Phanatic posted:Pyrex kitchenware used to be made from borosilicate glass, too. Until they sold the name off and now it's just regular crappy soda-lime glass. Yeah that was super disappointing, Pyrex used to be a cut above for kitchenware, now it's fragile as hell.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:26
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Kwyndig posted:Yeah that was super disappointing, Pyrex used to be a cut above for kitchenware, now it's fragile as hell. What is the recommended glassware these days then?
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Apr 18, 2016 19:25
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Kwyndig posted:Yeah that was super disappointing, Pyrex used to be a cut above for kitchenware, now it's fragile as hell. The reasoning I read is that most kitchen glassware isn't shattered due to thermal shock, it's shattered due to impacts. So now it's made out of a more impact resistant tempered glass that will blow apart due to thermal shock. The more important reason is probably that the glass they use now is cheaper, but the pieces can still be sold at Pyrex prices.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:00
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My work involves doing trace analyses of halogenides by ion chromatography. I can't use glass vessels since they still undergo reactions with them, and are possibly contaminated by metals or anions. That's, uh, neither very exciting nor glass-destroying awesomeness, but totally a real-world application. Heat-resistant borosilicate glass is nice, until you start destroying your kitchenware by treating it the same way.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:25
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Solution is to buy heat resistant borosilicate lab glassware for your kitchen.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:53
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Regarding those probes, they would be traveling at 20% of lightspeed, correct? So what happens if they impact something, relativistic projectiles tend to pack a LOT of punch...
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Apr 18, 2016 20:54
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ol qwerty bastard posted:How would you keep them warm and powered in interstellar space? I've been imagining these things basically going cold and dormant until they get close enough to a star to wake up. Even if most of the mass of the probe were plutonium I don't think it would be enough considering how small they have to be. Blankies.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:57
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Ambaire posted:Regarding those probes, they would be traveling at 20% of lightspeed, correct? So what happens if they impact something, relativistic projectiles tend to pack a LOT of punch... They'll get totally hosed up by little specs of dust. You don't even have to be going relativistically quick, there's been a few incidents in LEO of astronauts getting their suits punctured by micrometeoroids. However, once you get beyond LEO, it's not really a major concern. Humanity has really been working at the Kessler Syndrome for a while.
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Apr 18, 2016 21:14
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There was also at least one incident where a Shuttle almost lost pressure due to collision with a paint chip on the front windows.
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Apr 18, 2016 21:42
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A White Guy posted:They'll get totally hosed up by little specs of dust. You don't even have to be going relativistically quick, there's been a few incidents in LEO of astronauts getting their suits punctured by micrometeoroids. However, once you get beyond LEO, it's not really a major concern. Humanity has really been working at the Kessler Syndrome for a while. I was just thinking about the possible future alien ramifications. Suppose he sends this stream of 300 probes to Alpha Centauri and there happen to be aliens in the system and the probes impact alien ships or whatever, how much damage could they cause. It doesn't seem to be a very responsible idea... Oh hey, this culture is sending relativistic projectile probes into a star system blind, what the gently caress are they thinking? What would happen if one of these impacted a space station like the ISS?
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Apr 19, 2016 02:13
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Ambaire posted:I was just thinking about the possible future alien ramifications. Suppose he sends this stream of 300 probes to Alpha Centauri and there happen to be aliens in the system and the probes impact alien ships or whatever, how much damage could they cause. It doesn't seem to be a very responsible idea... Oh hey, this culture is sending relativistic projectile probes into a star system blind, what the gently caress are they thinking? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLSZ_Sao2KU
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Apr 19, 2016 02:19
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Left Ventricle posted:What is the recommended glassware these days then? Vintage Pyrex is the usual answer. You can try importing Pyrex‐branded stuff from Europe, where it’s still borosilicate. Ambaire posted:I was just thinking about the possible future alien ramifications. Suppose he sends this stream of 300 probes to Alpha Centauri and there happen to be aliens in the system and the probes impact alien ships or whatever, how much damage could they cause. It doesn't seem to be a very responsible idea... Oh hey, this culture is sending relativistic projectile probes into a star system blind, what the gently caress are they thinking? Everyone on the station dies. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 02:26 on Apr 19, 2016 |
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Apr 19, 2016 02:23
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Ambaire posted:I was just thinking about the possible future alien ramifications. Suppose he sends this stream of 300 probes to Alpha Centauri and there happen to be aliens in the system and the probes impact alien ships or whatever, how much damage could they cause. It doesn't seem to be a very responsible idea... Oh hey, this culture is sending relativistic projectile probes into a star system blind, what the gently caress are they thinking? Well they say they're going to be the size of an iPhone, and travel at 0.2c. 0.192kg*60,000,000m/s=230,400,000 Newtons of force imparted in 0.1 seconds. Realistically, it would go through one side and out the other without slowing appreciably, and rapidly break apart, and there would no longer be a differentiation between inside and outside. If you were on EVA at the time, you'd probably be fine. Well, you'd be hosed, but temporarily fine. Also, if we can (conceivably) communicate with a probe in the AC system, and assuming there were aliens there with the same level of technology as us, well, we constantly listen to them for radio signals, so they'd probably be doing the same thing for that G-class main sequence star about (4.4 light years in their units) away. We'd have spoken to each other by now. There's no one there.
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Apr 19, 2016 02:30
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Deteriorata posted:Any alkaline solution can slowly dissolve glass. Long-term storage of hydroxide solutions needs to be done in plastic bottles. Glass bottles with alkalis in them slowly frost up due to corrosion of the inner surface. It can be a significant source of contamination in some situations. Remember getting conc hydroxides in glass with wax liners. Now a days it's all plastic in the lab. Though I imagine you can get both depending on what you're doing. Each have their own trace impurities.
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Apr 19, 2016 02:48
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Memento posted:Well they say they're going to be the size of an iPhone, and travel at 0.2c. At the very least there's no one there who uses radio, so they're very far ahead or very far behind our technology curve. Most likely option is no one is there though.  It doesn't help that the whole trinary star system makes planetary formation in a habitable zone extremely unlikely.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:16
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One reason to avoid glass is if you believe your reaction might have a significant exotherm or gas-produce. Plastic shrapnel is kinder than glass shrapnel.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:49
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The Biggest Bonehead Award in our lab is the mounted remains of a sulfuric acid dilution in a plastic bottle gone wrong.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:56
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Kwyndig posted:At the very least there's no one there who uses radio, so they're very far ahead or very far behind our technology curve. or maybe they send point-to-point tightband signals, and aren't interested in our broadcasts.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:56
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Memento posted:0.192kg*60,000,000m/s=230,400,000 Newtons of force imparted in 0.1 seconds. Realistically, it would go through one side and out the other without slowing appreciably, and rapidly break apart, and there would no longer be a differentiation between inside and outside. If you were on EVA at the time, you'd probably be fine. Well, you'd be hosed, but temporarily fine. It's a bit of a digression, but I think it's appropriate to this thread: There's no reason to assume, even at that speed, that the probe would just punch through. Materials behave noticeably differently at even normally achievable high speed impacts (i.e. kilometers per second); I'm not aware of any literature on what would happen at relativistic speeds, though admittedly I haven't looked. If I had to guess, I would expect the probe to dump a lot of energy in the impact, which honestly would be even worse for the station. A clean penetration in and out the other side would probably be the best case scenario.
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Apr 19, 2016 04:24
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Log082 posted:It's a bit of a digression, but I think it's appropriate to this thread: Oh, it'll punch through, but not in the same form it punched in. It's carrying kinetic energy equal to a tactical nuclear weapon, it's going to instantly turn into a rapidly expanding cloud of x-ray-hot plasma. This would not be good for the space station, even if the cloud of plasma is still continuing on its way at a velocity slightly slower than it impacted with. Phanatic has a new favorite as of 04:56 on Apr 19, 2016 |
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Apr 19, 2016 04:30
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230.4 million newtons = 2.3ish kilotons of force. Not quite hiroshima status, but anything that gets nailed by an iphone flying at .2c is going to get hosed up at that speed. The Tsungska event probably generated around 20 kilotons and flattened an area a little less than half the size of Connecticut, so the kind of civilization that would notice a thing like that would have to pretty advanced,at least advanced enough to have a huge network of satellites orbiting their planet that would notice a 2.4kiloton detonation(so, basically on our same tech level). I don't know about how objects entering an atmosphere at .2c would function, but my guess is that it would definitely slam into whatever planet it hit, atmosphere be damned. Atmosphere reentry at relativistic speeds would be an exciting, albeit incredibly short-lived, field of study. So yes, anything in orbit that made contact with something zipping at .2c would be obliterated instantly. Secondly, at that speed, it would be very difficult for an alien space agency to track that kind of object. They would be  as poo poo about what happened, though, assuming they had intelligent minds like our own, they'd understand that this thunderbolt from the gods was definitely not natural in origin. If they were advanced enough to magically know it was us (because lol at the thought of accident investigation on that kind of thing), we'd be hosed in a wickers hat if they were somehow capable of waging war across interstellar distances. However, the most most likely scenario is that you send your iphone cubesat zipping past a planet orbiting the trinary system of Proxima Centauri. It sends back super grainy pictures (somehow, your engineers are literal miracle workers), its a keenly unfriendly place for life as we know it(which is pretty narrow, sadly). It also detects the presence of some natural satellites. Our limited analysis also says they suck for life as we know it. And then that little cubesat just keeps on going, off into the cosmos. The odds of actually hitting an artificial object in orbit around an exoplanet are unbelievably low. Space is big, huge, gigantic. You really have to try to hit a thing, and the odds of even getting near an exo-planet shooting a cubesat from Earth are pretty absurdly low.
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Apr 19, 2016 05:01
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Force and TNT‐equivalent are not directly comparable, or am I missing something here?
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Apr 19, 2016 05:05
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A White Guy posted:And then that little cubesat just keeps on going, off into the cosmos. The odds of actually hitting an artificial object in orbit around an exoplanet are unbelievably low. Space is big, huge, gigantic. You really have to try to hit a thing, and the odds of even getting near an exo-planet shooting a cubesat from Earth are pretty absurdly low. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCoHT_cHPzY I know, games, but this made me laugh when I saw it. "We do not *eyeball* it."
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Apr 19, 2016 05:16
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Platystemon posted:Force and TNT‐equivalent are not directly comparable, or am I missing something here? I think we're just going with abstractions to approximate the amount of energy released. Sometimes science is more art than science, Platy, a lot of people don't get it hat.
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Apr 19, 2016 05:22
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maybe he means force in kilotons, like "the weight of a thousand tons"
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Apr 19, 2016 06:03
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Minarchist posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCoHT_cHPzY Laughed my rear end off at that one. "Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest sonofabitch in space!"
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Apr 19, 2016 06:24
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Luneshot posted:maybe he means force in kilotons, like "the weight of a thousand tons" The mass referred to earlier was 0.192 kilograms. At .2c, that would be carrying 3.6E14 joules of kinetic energy. That's 86 kilotons equivalent.
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Apr 19, 2016 06:30
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Phanatic posted:The mass referred to earlier was 0.192 kilograms. At .2c, that would be carrying 3.6E14 joules of kinetic energy. That's 86 kilotons equivalent. I.e. significantly more than Little Boy, but only a fraction will be released in the collision. Much of it will remain with the debris. What fraction? I don’t know, but even a small fraction means a very bad day for the station’s denizens.
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Apr 19, 2016 06:37
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Platystemon posted:I.e. significantly more than Little Boy, but only a fraction will be released in the collision. Much of it will remain with the debris. Fortunately the momentum transfer means that most of the poo poo that gets energy dumped into it also gets dumped into space.
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Apr 19, 2016 06:49
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Yo, I was thinking and um...and i know this sounds REAL crazy and all Bear with me a minute here okay. Maybe...um...you SHOULDN'T get hit with things traveling at appreciable fractions of light speed? It's real bad. And real fast. And the most fiendish concoctions of man pale in comparison to things hitting each other real hard, real fast. In the bad sort of way. Basically any race of intelligent beings that gets a Relativistic Kill Vehicle built is an automatic and immediate threat. There's either no one out there, or they're rightfully terrified of saying "we're here!" *broadcasts some lovely 80s pop out to the stars* -Humanity
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Apr 19, 2016 06:54
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Sure, but *without* that lovely 80s pop, how are you going to distract the guy with the relativistic kill vehicle by challenging him to a dance-off?
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Apr 19, 2016 06:58
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Minarchist posted:Yo, I was thinking and um...and i know this sounds REAL crazy and all See, the way I think of it is that it's not worth worrying about how hosed I'd be if something hit me at relativistic speeds. Because the bits of me that would be able to comprehend how hosed I'd be would be too hosed to do anything close to comprehending.
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Apr 19, 2016 07:06
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ol qwerty bastard posted:Sure, but *without* that lovely 80s pop, how are you going to distract the guy with the relativistic kill vehicle by challenging him to a dance-off? lol'd but they fire off that RKV as soon as they get a targeting vector on where We Are The World is being broadcast from. Sorry, I'm  about Xenos knowing we even exist, much less where we are.
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Apr 19, 2016 07:09
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