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supercooling


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You can cool water down below zero Celsius if the water is pure. The reason is that ice crystals need some impurity to form around.

 

It takes a little practice to get the time right, but if you put a bottle of mineral water in the freezer for a few hours you can get it below zero without freezing. Carefully get it out of the fridge and gently tap it. If you get this all right it will freeze solid in front of your eyes.

 

Try it also with tap water.

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The picture in OP and AJB's comments seem to relate more to Sodium Acetate? What does this have to do with cooling? Those are exothermic reactions.

 

 

Sodium Acetate, as used in heat pads etc?

 

My comments were not (at least intentionally) to do with this.

 

 

It is well-known that you can supercool water provided it has very few impurities. I believe you can find youtube videos of this.

 

I did it once by accident. I intended to cool down a bottle of flavoured water by placing it in the freezer. I left it a little longer than I intended. I was very pleased to see that it had not frozen. Then as soon as I opened the bottle I could hear "cracking" and the flavoured water froze hard in a few seconds in front of my eyes. My wife was very much amazed.

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Yes as in heat pads.

 

Sorry, I am well aware of supercooling water but with the regular tools a household has i would find it difficult to achieve because of the impurities of the equipment.

I've tried something similar, whereby I attempted to increase the boiling point of water by multi filtering through a charcoal filter and heating water in a microwave then introducing some kind of impurity to the mix afterwards.

 

The experiment didnt quite work out and I can only assume this was due to the difficulties of purifying water to the to the required extent.

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You can cool water down below zero Celsius if the water is pure. The reason is that ice crystals need some impurity to form around.

 

It takes a little practice to get the time right, but if you put a bottle of mineral water in the freezer for a few hours you can get it below zero without freezing. Carefully get it out of the fridge and gently tap it. If you get this all right it will freeze solid in front of your eyes.

 

Try it also with tap water.

 

I've seen similar experiments done with bottles of Corona, after cooling for several hours you need only to tap the bottle on a counter top to introduce carbon dioxide bubbles which makes the freezing point drop so rapidly if freezes right before your eyes.

 

 

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