> Hangzhou Sage Chemical Company. They offer it in 100g, 500g, and 1 kilo amounts, which is interesting, because I don't think a kilo of dioxygen difluoride has ever existed. Someone should call them on this - ask for the free shipping, and if they object, tell them Amazon offers it on this item. Serves 'em right. Morons.
Gold
Absolute classic of the genera
At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature.
If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic.Previously:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dioxygen%20difluoride
And others in the series:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=things%20won%27t%20work
https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...
High overlap with: (rocket fuels)
Not a Chemist but reminded me about this article: https://gizmodo.com/chlorine-trifluoride-the-chemical-that-s...
> Just to get the ball rolling, here’s a few of the more unusual things chlorine trifluoride is known to set fire to on contact: glass, sand, asbestos, rust, concrete, people, pyrex, cloth, and the dreams of children…
One of the fun parts of chemistry is that most chemicals that ordinarily exist are quite far from having the most extreme possible properties that you can ascribe to a chemical. It doesn’t really matter what the property is. This is almost by definition, as “extreme properties” is roughly a synonym for “extremely unfavorable thermodynamics”.
Nonetheless, chemists are obsessed with these because in theory you can engineer chemicals with completely implausible, or at the very least counter-intuitive, properties in a lab if you can figure out how to do it. It is the equivalent of extreme performance-engineering geekery in software. You do it because you can, not necessarily because you have a use case.
Topics like “theoretical limits of high explosive power” [0] and a lot of other things that will put you on a government list are something chemists definitely geek out on.
The Rocketdyne Tripropellant rocket had great specific impulse, one of the best. But-- there are many reasons it never caught on: one of the byproducts was FOOF, along with other things like hydrofluoric acid.
This guy's writing style makes him a worldwide treasure, and probably inspired a few young chemists.
I'll always read and re-read his blog posts when they are posted here.
I think there's some stuff in a book called Ignition about experiments using Fluorine as an oxidizer in rocket engines to get a little better specific impulse than oxygen. Only problem is that the exhaust is hydrofluoric acid at thousands of degrees. Yipe.
YouTube chemists visit Dr. Kraus' fluorine lab in Germany: https://youtu.be/UzIH6raTxyE?si=74Pfn0i8Whq09Iim
I remember this article and I'm laughing before I even click the link. What a delightful read. Even more delightful I've never encountered this molecule.
Bit rot: the article links to http://www.lateralscience.co.uk which is now just an advertisement for online gambling.
> 433 kcal/mole
For reference, TNT is 1kcal/g. This is 6.2 kcal/g.
There are two kinds of popular reposts in the world.
Most are Type 1, which is "meh, this again" followed by a scroll away.
This is an excellent example of Type 2, which is "Oh boy! I get to read this again!"
(See also: the SR71 speed check story; the story of Mel, the Real Programmer; etc.)
Dioxygen Difluoride
That both words start with DIe! is enough to warn me off.
I will always reread the story about Satan's Kimchi.
In case you weren't dissuaded by the article, here's the synthesis procedure that it starts off by referencing: https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1139(00)803...
I clicked that permalink to lateral science ("Blown up or poisoned") and unfortunately the website appears to be hacked. :(
I wonder if you can still order a kilo of "Satan's kimchi" from that supplier in China. If you ever could.
A. G. Streng would probably have been forgotten about like so many if he hadn't been such a risk taking experimental chemist. Now someone's probably going to make a movie or comic book about him.
Have already read this before and was interesting.
I did some research and inquiry and found out you can in fact get florine gas....and they can even compress it in tanks if you want.
Derek Lowe would never work with it, but this wikipedia page [1] lists 4 rocket propellant choices that contain F2O2 as the oxydizer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_rocket_propellant#Bipro...
Ah, good ol' FOOF: the chemical with the convenient name-synchronicity to what it will do to you!
Ah yes, FOOF. The last sound you hear before you melt, explode, blow up, and disassociate at a molecular level.
Relevant https://what-if.xkcd.com/40/
FOOF, not to be confused with F00F (a bug in the Pentium which allowed unprivileged processes to lock up the system): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug
I love Derek Lowe's writing. I think I've read most of his articles but this series is my favorite.
2010 being 15 years ago is making me feel pretty ancient.
FOOF-sulfur rocket engine would be fun.
hopefully this isn't trending because of the recent controversy about fluoride in tap water?
Good old FOOF
The article is good stuff. It's a shame he's now having to be writing Crisis, Part IX etc about the Trump admin trying to trash things. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43418192)
FOOF, not to be confused with the FLOOF's that everyone wants to work with
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> fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature. But that's how you get it to react with oxygen to make a product that's worse in pretty much every way.
That kind of prose is why I love reading this chap's stuff.