Chemistry facts with Erin #1

So this was meant to be researched and posted yesterday but obviously stuff happened. That being said, I'm putting time into this now.

Firstly, explosions are fun. Very fun. Many explosions make use of the element Nitrogen. To give two well-known examples, TNT (Trinitrotoluene, or 2,4,6-Trinitromethylbenzene), and Nitroglycerin. (Propane-1,2,3-triyl trinitrate) Both of these compounds are chemically unstable, and for good reason. Without getting too much into the nitty gritty, the nitrogen within these compounds would much rather be anywhere else - particularly a triple bond with itself. Nitrogen really likes to triple bond. A lot of energy is keeping them forced into the single or double bond in nitrate compounds, and all that energy is released, usually by a shock or other stimulation to create an explosion, releasing nitrogen gas. As you can see, below, neither compound contains a triple bonded hydrogen.

Here's TNT

And here's nitroglycerin

Hope I explained that well enough.

So, they are known to be chemically unstable. The "fire diamond" has them ranked as being the maximum level of instability - i.e they will explode very easily. In terms of explosive instability, however, TNT is rather tame. It can be melted very safely and is very hard to accidentally detonate - needing at least 353N of frictional force for kaboom.

Nitroglycerin, on the other hand, is known to be a hassle. It's highly sensitive to shock and friction and even is chemically unstable to the point where it is a genuine danger to use or transport, as any impurities in the mixture can cause it to be even less predictable than it already is.

But the compound I am about to dwarfs even the unstable nitroglycerin. To try and give some perspective - Both TNT and nitroglycerin contain three Nitrogen atoms. But I am about to introduce an explosive that makes both of these look like a tea party.

Introducing, azadoazide azide!

So, you've seen the previous two explosives, both of which have literal uses involved in their explosive properties when the three nitrogen atoms in them don't want to play ball. But this.. well.. here's a picture of it.

There are FOURTEEN nitrogen atoms in there, making the compound just under 90% nitrogen by weight. That is almost unheard of. This was produced in 2011 by a lab of chemists who were experts at creating highly explosive compounds like this. So let's take a look at the information they gathered on it.

They touched it. It blew up. They moved it. It blew up. They tried dissolving it in solution. It blew up. You'll never guess what happened when they exposed it to a bright light. Okay, surely leaving it alone in a dark room won't do anything... right?

Nope. It blew up.

So.. this is pretty unstable, exploding even when left to its own devices for a while. Maybe it's best if we step back and try and get some more information on this, right? Maybe put it into a spectroscopy machine for analysis...?

Well, the scientists thought that was a good idea. I have no idea how they managed to get it in the machine without it blowing up, but upon turning the spectroscopy machine on...... it blew up. And this happened, according to the paper that was written on this compound, more than once. They were actually brave enough to continue to persist with trying to work with what can only be described as a chemical demon.

Eventually, the lab, which specialized with high explosives concluded with, and I quote;

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"The sensitivity of C2N14 is beyond our capabilities of measurement. The smallest possible loadings in shock and friction tests led to explosive decomposition"

To this day, it seems nobody else has dared to try and resynthesise and analyse this compound any further. Exploding for literally no reason is not the hallmark of a chemical that has much use in anything, really, aside from the wonder of how the hell they managed to get all that nitrogen in to the same compound.

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing this. I planned to talk about more than just this, but once I read the very name of azadoazide azide (the very use of just one azide is enough to make a highly explosive chemical) I had to dig down this rabbit hole, lest three.)

Anyway, see y'all for the next one.

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↩  Miasmus carbon skeletons

A carbon skeleton is a simplified structural diagram of an organic compound. For basics, each line indicates a carbon with the maximum number of hydrogens bonded to it. Double and triple bonds are indicated by the double and triple lines.

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↩  Miasmus hydrocarbons

Hydrocarbons are compounds containing just hydrogen and carbon, such as alkanes like ethane or methane, but aklenes and alkynes are also included in these.

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↩  Miasmus function groups do to them

Functional groups give the basic organic compounds extra functionality. They're the tools of a trade, and a lot of organic chemistry focuses on how the functional groups (like R-COOH or even just C=O functional groups) interact with each other.

↩  StevenNL2000

Yes, I came across that fact during my research (although didn't watch the video until you sent it.)

I personally didn't brush over it as although the presence of nitrogen did attribute to some of its explosiveness, the main reason it was so easy to set off was a lot more difficult for me to explain than it was for azidoazide azide - involving, as Wikipedia put it, unusual steric strain due to the three iodines.