omg chem fun.

On wednesday, there was a demonstration showing the reaction between KMnO4 and glycerine. They react only with each other, and very strongly exothermic, without even a need for any additional heating or oxygen. Basically, you see a bright lilac flame with lots of smoke (though not quite as much as KNO3/sugar reaction), and the more reactants you have, the more smoke and flame you have.

The best part is, they left a huge bottle of KMnO4 and glycine out in the charge of people crazier than me. Of course, knowing that they were crazy, those crazy people were occasionally watched by a teacher. But when the teacher was looking away, the fun began. One of the crazy people just finished drinking a bottle of coke, and I suggested mixing the stuff in the bottle. And so we did. Oh, the smoke! Oh, the fumes! It was pretty spectacular.

Then I suggested reacting the stuff in the bottle with the cap on. However, you can't react this stuff in the school, because we knew full well it would explode, and we have not known how loud it would be. Considering that the school didn't even allow smoke bombs (which aren't even bombs at all), what more something that explodes and spews smoke and fire? So we took some KMnO4 and a bottle containing some glycerine out of RJ and found a nice spot to deploy it: a butress root.

Now what's so good about a butress root, you say? Well, only rather large trees have butress roots, and between butress roots are huge cavities which point directly outwards. This means that you can plant the bottle in the cavity and stand behind the tree; you'll be safe. If the tree collapses, nothing you could have done would make this experiment safe enough to not kill you, so it is not much of a concern anyway.

And so here we have a pile of KMnO4 and a bottle of glycerine and a bottle cap. Problem: How do you put the KMnO4 into the bottle and cap up the bottle tightly without it exploding in your face? So one crazy guy thought of stuffing the KMnO4 into the bottle cap and capping up the bottle with at bottle cap. Not a bad idea, but we didn't realise that the bottle cap had a speck of glycerine in it. Oh the fun! Oh the joy! The bottle cap was reduced (or rather, oxidized) to nothingness in no time.

Now we have a bottle with glycerine and no bottle cap and no KMnO4. The question still remains, how do you cap up the bottle without it blowing up in your face?

A certain guy had a brilliant idea. He took an empty tissue packet (made of plastic) and he koped KMnO4 with it and with a bunch of crazy people (like me), he ran out of the school. to the butress root. Then, we stuffed the entire plastic packet into the bottle. Now, recall that plastic is waterproof, so the KMnO4 sat comfortably in the plastic packet, and the glycerine out of it. Perfect. We had ample time to screw on the bottle cap. After screwing on the bottle cap, all that remained was shaking the bottle.

And so we shook it, and dropped it on the ground. No response. Weird. So we kicked it. White fumes emerged in the bottle. In a split second, the bottle exploded with the loudness of a balloon (quite disappointing) and flew across the road with a trail of smoke. It almost hit a passing car, but the car couldn't avoid being caught in the smoke trail. Nothing much happened to it. The exploded bottle hit the middle of the road and stopped, with a flame that lasted uncannily long. A plastic bottle shouldn't burn for 5 minutes. Later, upon investigation, we found out that it was the glycerine that was burning.

Chemicals can be fun.