So I was searching for new episode ideas when I came across this old chemistry
party trick where you can pop a balloon without touching it using nothing but
orange peel. So I thought let's try it. So what we're gonna try to show you today
is we're going to demonstrate that the substances in an orange peel can
actually pop a balloon and then we are going to go hog-wild and we're going to
see what else we can use to pop a balloon and rank household chemicals
according to how balloon probable they are.
So I'm gonna cut a slice of orange peel here.
They release some lovely chemicals and one of them is a
chemical called limonene and it smells very nice and it is organic it's a
hydrocarbon - means it's made of carbon carbon hydrogen. It also functions very
well as they solve it meaning things can dissolve in it I've already got some of
the oils out of the orange peel I think if I even pick up I just got some on my
finger I think if I even know that's not enough, huh?
We're gonna try and pop this - oh there we go so that does work and all I really
did was twist. So it doesn't take very much at all. So limonene is an organic
solvent it's made of carbon hydrogen. The balloon is made of polyisoprene
which is also made of carbon and hydrogen and because in chemistry like
dissolves like, the limonene is a very good solvent for the polyisoprene.
We checked with our resident polymer expert Michelle Boucher on this and she
told us that like dissolves like goes even deeper than just carbon and
hydrogen. Both limonene and polyisoprene have
carbon-carbon double bonds which means they are super, super good at interacting
making the limonene an almost perfect solvent for the rubber. So, when I get
even a little bit of that on the balloon ...
it dissolves just enough of the
rubber that the balloon pops.
Which here I have a beautiful party balloon
which is hopefully what we're going to see now is the reason that, I'm going to go ahead
and cut a fresh piece of peel. The reason that I've been using water balloons
instead of once is because, well, let's see let's
find out if this is gonna work. It doesn't seem to be working and I'll tell
you a secret. Oh it did go! Well it did work! So here's
the thing I must have gotten cheap party balloons. Rubber that is vulcanized will
not be susceptible to this because vulcanized rubber is not just carbon
hydrogen it's had some sulfur added to it. The sulfur actually cross-links which
is a technical term but it means exactly what it says it, these long polymer
chains the balloon is made of it forms bridges between them and it actually
links them together so that makes the rubber much much stronger. I read
that some party balloons as opposed to water balloons are made of not, made
of vulcanized rubber so they won't pop but apparently these are not made of
vulcanized rubber because I got it pop. We're gonna see if different kinds of
citrus have enough limonene in them to also work. So I'm gonna cut a nice bit of
grapefruit peel here which certainly smells, "grapefruity,"
not a big grapefruit fan. We're try yep that works! There's gonna
be so many little bits of rubber all over my kitchen.
Lime next.
Nice lime peel here.
Theoretically ... see that smells nicel.
There's enough on my glove.
That's just from the amount that's on my glove!
So, you can tell, it doesn't take very much. Let's try the lime a second time.
Yep! The lime works! Let's round it out.
We're not worried about that too much
That was just from cutting the lemon!
Okay, so, I think the lemon works!
I'm good with concluding that the lemon works from that.
You can see that I've gone back to the party balloons because since they're
made of non vulcanized rubber they're more fun and easier to blow up than the
water balloons so I'm going to use the party balloons instead of the water
balloons. A couple of different things that I want to try here in addition to
the live need from the orange peel this is a commercially available adhesive
remover and it does not list the ingredients on the label and I couldn't
find them online either so I think it's proprietary however according to some of
my research supposedly this stuff contains limonene. So here's what happens
when you have a polymer chemist on speed dial.
Michelle offered to do a quick bit of spectroscopy for us and found evidence
of those carbon-carbon double bonds in the adhesive remover. Limonene confirmed?
Not quite, but, there are definitely double bonds in something and that means
it's definitely a good solvent for the rubber. So we're gonna see if that will
also pop a balloon. I'm just gonna drizzle some on from like the outside of
them from the base of the spray pump. That does not appear to work, interestingly.
Yes, it does!
Just a bit of a delayed reaction. Sure did show me.
It says, "citrus power," on the
label so I think there's a very good chance this does in fact contain
limonene and I also wanted to try it because in general it is a good organic
solvent that is why it removes those sticky adhesives and stuff is because it
is a water-hating hydrophobic organic solvent and that is exactly what is
going to dissolve this carbon and hydrogen rubber here. If I was wearing
latex gloves that would probably dissolve those as well I'm actually
wearing nitrile gloves for that reason and also because I like nitrile gloves
better. I don't know if this is going to work either you know maybe I should get
stir rod because I don't want to just drizzle my kitchen supply of olive oil
onto a balloon.
We'll see if this, um, olive oil ...
So the olive oil does I'm rubbing it in here and if it's having an effect it's not
having nearly as much of an effect dissolving the balloon as the limonene. In
addition to the size of the fatty acid chains olive oil doesn't have as many
carbon-carbon double bonds per carbon-carbon single bond compared to
either rubber or Lyman II which might also make it a worse solvent for rubber
but maybe it works just well enough?
After that we tried a whole bunch of polar organic solvents once made of
carbon hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen is really greedy for electrons and it tends
to pull them towards itself, that means it's often slightly negatively charged
when it's bonded to carbon or hydrogen. That's what we mean when we call these
guys polar and those slightly charged polar molecules don't dissolve rubber
very well as you can see
Also the vinegar is actually mostly water anyway it made the worst noise though.
Really annoying noises. If anyone knows the chemistry of why vinegar is
making annoying squeaky noises please leave in a comment.
Hey, huge shoutout, slash
even bigger thanks than usual to Michelle this week who fact checks every
single one of our videos. But, this time she also granted us her time as a
subject matter expert and even took an IR spectrum for us. I think it's true
love. Thanks to everyone for watching let us know if you enjoy these sorts of
demos I thought it was really really fun to do especially because I didn't know
what was gonna happen so we got to find out together and remember to subscribe
and share so that I didn't sacrifice my kitchen for nothing.
We'll see you next week. So we could go out with a bang and pop the rest of the balloons?