Carbon Foam: an incredible material made from everyday items.

Science! Experiments! Chemistry! Hack! Superlatives! Hyperbole!
This is an experiment* to see if I could pyrolyse mundane materials into super heat resistant, lightweight and insulating carbon foam.
Short answer: YES. Long answer: YES. Original Idea from this article:
* experiment in the youtube sense of the word; meaning demonstration.

[KrazeeCain]

You know you've fucked up breakfast when you've accidentally made a refractory tile.

[shannonlove]

The Soviets experimented with and might have IIRC deployed a re-entry shield made of carbonized peanut shell husk. Any form of structured carbon like that will have extraordinary thermal properties.

What you've got there is actually "activated" charcoal, one attribute of which is a massive surface area per volume when you measure all the bubbles inside. That's why it's so good at filtering, a cubic centimeter of the stuff has an effective surface area of dozens and even hundreds of meters.

Both the high electrical resistance and heat resistance come from the fractal/recursive structure in which big bubbles are made of walls of smaller bubbles, which are made of even smaller bubbles all the way down to the nanoscale.

For electricity, this means a vast number of paths with the same resistance. The current cannot find a single shortest path and therefore even though pure carbon is a good conductor, in this form the conductivity produces a tangle of current paths.

Heat faces a similar challenge. The increased vibrations of direct thermal energy have move through all the bubble/cell walls which a 1) thin and not very conductive and 2) are made of bubbles themselves even thinner and less conductive. The bubbles are filled with an inert gas CO2 in the simple case but the small bubble size prevents effective convection. Radiant heat across the bubbles is blocked by absorption of the black material and the very smallest bubbles can be considerably small than the wavelength if infrared, producing a quantum effect in which photons of those wavelengths have trouble hopping the bubble.

The deal breaker with this material is its lack of structural strength. Just won't take shocks or impacts.

[lampman]

In this episode AvE burns his toast. And then he burns it some more.

[em]

Cobble together some aluminum bits, cover it in wonder bread and toss in an arduino and you got yourself a space shuttle.

[stinkymcissueno]

My grandma would have made me scrape the carbon off and eat it anyways.

[funshootin]

boom! you made original carbon- carbon .. I was lucky enough to get to talk in depth with a customer of 91 yrs old who worked on the original spy satellites, specifically on the reentry vehicles that dropped the film canister from orbit to be caught mid air via parachute to plane with a hook meetings before the rv hits the Pacific. .he worked for the contractor up through the keyhole series into the hexagons.. he had on his desk a big round 1 inch thick circle slab bout 6 inches in diameter, of this odd phenolic clear brown tan reddish material with what looked like flat fabric squares sunk in epoxy ... Essentially that's what it was, they would cut 1 inch squares of cotton fabric like as if you cut up a white tshirt into perfect square pieces, took a handful and soaked in epoxy resin of some kind or phenolic resin and then let it cure under tremendous pressure into this plastic molded shape of resin impregnated cotton squares, they would then bake and burn off that resin leaving behind what they named carbon carbon which is the forerunner to heat abatement tiles like on the space shuttle or at least that's how he described the process in layman's terms to me. hell of a interesting engineer this guy, it was a pleasure to pick his brain, they went onto

[jamesb]

Carbonize a whole loaf, hollow out the center and make a furnace with it. See if it can handle melting of various metals

[TheArcticWonder]

It deeply disturbs me that AvE knows all this technical information about so many different things, but also knows what felching is. He truly is a complex man.

[rrni]

I was going to post a chemistry joke here but the best ones argon.

[Rickmakes]

Nothing a little butter won't fix

[Thelawncarenut]

That ending got to me, right in the feels.

[BoffinGrusky]

If I glue this stuff onto my 67 Dodge, will I be able to re-enter Earth's atmosphere without burning-up?

[express]

They use 'charcoal' blocks in the jewellery trade for soldering/melting pads. They deteriorate, and you usually keep them going for years, by wrapping wire around them to hold them together. You could make a new one every few weeks with this idea :) Ahh I left the comment before i got to the end!! Its ok if your using someone elses time and gas.

[gist]

What you did with the toast is the same chemical process for making char-cloth. I just recently did that by throwing some pieces of 100%cotton in an altioids tin and throwing it in the fire. You might get away with just heating the toast in a tin for a while without the argon or any complicated setup. Cool video! Interesting that the same process that makes highly combustible material can also make flame-resistant material.

[krisztianszirtes]

My grandmother told me that when she was a kid, her mother used spoiled plum jam mixed with sand to insulate the walls of the fireplace they used for heating. They left it to dry out and it made the same foamy graphite layer.

[Niarbeht]

*goes to channel*
Ohhhh, what did the madman do this time?
Ah. He's overdone his toast, I see.

[JuliansRandomProject]

Beer is a great time keeping mechanism!

[DJ_Dett]

Air is honestly one of the best insulators, and that hunka-chunka wonder charcoal will certainly hold plenty of it!
One interesting thing about carbon is that it's actually a conductor. Not much, but it will conduct. When using carbon fiber materials in aircraft parts, you have to make sure you have grounding straps bonded to the carbon fiber layers to ground out any currents and act as a sacrificial anode. Otherwise, it'll turn your aluminum parts into chowder!

[billville]

". . . it's been a good three fourths of a beer now. . . ". lol

[SoftBreadSoft]

6600c... 11, 000+ F. So I could make a forge with... Bread