Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride (2010)

  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.

pixl97• 1 year ago

Ah yes, FOOF. The last sound you hear before you melt, explode, blow up, and disassociate at a molecular level.

m4rtink2• 1 year ago

And all of that at the same time! ;-)

mouse_• 1 year ago

I clicked that permalink to lateral science ("Blown up or poisoned") and unfortunately the website appears to be hacked. :(

doug-moen• 1 year ago

The page is archived, and it is a fun read: https://web.archive.org/web/20111229065146/http://www.latera...

bovermyer• 1 year ago

I wonder if you can still order a kilo of "Satan's kimchi" from that supplier in China. If you ever could.

rbanffy4• 1 year ago

Check the address. If the building is still standing, then no.

araes• 1 year ago

They don't appear to offer Dioxygen Difluoride (O2F2, CAS: 7783-44-0) [1] any longer.

[1] https://commonchemistry.cas.org/detail?cas_rn=7783-44-0

Closest they now offer is Tungsten difluoride dioxide (WO2F2, CAS: 14118-73-1). [2]

[2] http://www.sagechem.com/product/1037013

If you go to: R501 Tower A, New Youth Plaza, 8 Jia Shan Road, Hangzhou, China [3] you could ask in person.

[3] https://www.hxchem.net/English/hycontactlizi3865.html

Almost interested in sending them an email out of boredom just to see whether they make it with custom synthesis.

stuartjohnson12• 1 year ago

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

s0rce2• 1 year ago

Some chemical suppliers seem to have autogenerated items, some/many are non-sense and I guess they just hope that you find something and they can make it? I found the example below a while ago but they have since removed it.

https://www.nanochemazone.com/product/argon-powder/

ahazred8ta• 1 year ago

The argon powder is still there. Great for Apr01. https://www.nanochemazone.com/argon-powder/ -- https://web.archive.org/web/20250331192328/https://www.nanoc...

HPsquared• 1 year ago

Off topic, but I Googled "argon powder" and the AI overview thing hallucinated that the term means metal powders used for 3D printing, stored under argon to prevent oxidation. There are no actual results using the term in that sense, as far as I can tell.

Google search should not be returning an incorrect hallucination that sounds plausible ahead of the actual search results. It's so confidently wrong. Google is SO BAD NOW at searching for specific expressions.

leoc• 1 year ago

Someone finding themselves obliged to make and deliver a kilo of this stuff would be a strong opening for a shounen manga.

JoshTriplett• 1 year ago

More likely an isekai story, for variety over the usual truck.

GarnetFloride3• 1 year ago

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.

rbanffy4• 1 year ago

Sounds OK in vacuum...

Sharlin5• 1 year ago

If you want to actually get momentum out of a rocket, the reaction products are going to touch the combustion chamber walls and the nozzle. While film cooling can help with minimizing heat transfer from the hot stuff, I doubt it’s enough to keep this stuff from eating your engine from the inside.

the8472• 1 year ago

The line between serious proposals and shitposting is thin.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19700022572 https://x.com/ToughSf/status/1769958999279927787

fweimer• 1 year ago

Hmm, maybe it was part of NAIL SPIKE? https://reactormag.com/a-tall-tail/

khuey• 1 year ago

The 50s and 60s were a wild time.

rbanffy4• 1 year ago

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.

ourmandave• 1 year ago

Dioxygen Difluoride

That both words start with DIe! is enough to warn me off.

Ygg25• 1 year ago

Dihydorgen Dioxide. Oh no!

jerf2• 1 year ago

Not the best example. Hydrogen peroxide is actually rather nasty when highly pure. I mean, it's got nothing on FOOF, not many things do, but it's still in a class where it needs to be handled with care and shouldn't be handed to non-professionals. Don't be fooled by the fact it's sold in grocery stores at low concentrations.

icehawk• 1 year ago

High test peroxide is used as a rocket monopropellant, and was involved with the loss of the submarines HMS Sidon and Kursk.

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

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.

genocidicbunny• 1 year ago

There's something reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's style to Derek's "Things I Won't Work With" series.

Bluestein• 1 year ago

This makes the rounds here every so oft, and I always read it again, seconded ...

blantonl• 1 year ago

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.

stackedinserter• 1 year ago

FOOF-sulfur rocket engine would be fun.

GarnetFloride3• 1 year ago

That would be most definitely be classed as Type-3 fun.

IlikeKitties• 1 year ago

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…

btilly• 1 year ago

Derek Lowe also did chlorine trifluoride: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo....

CommieBobDole• 1 year ago

"It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers"

borski• 1 year ago

He wrote that one too, heh: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo...

It’s linked in the article

QuesnayJr• 1 year ago

That's a different article. The Gizmodo article has a byline of "Melissa" and apparently is originally from TodayIFoundOut.com.

speed_spread• 1 year ago

Knowing that rust can burn should make the joy of a few Linux maintainers.

LorenPechtel2• 1 year ago

Makes me wonder if it could burn a fire elemental. :)

They seem to model any chemical damage as "acid" and fire elementals aren't immune to acid so I would be inclined to say it would.

ubermonkey2• 1 year ago

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.)

MaKey• 1 year ago

I'd like to add the "We can't send mail more than 500 miles" story to that list: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

ubermonkey2• 1 year ago

OH, absolutely. That's another gem!

PebblesRox• 1 year ago

Ah, the SR-71 was new to me, thank you!

https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

shadowgovt4• 1 year ago

Ah, good ol' FOOF: the chemical with the convenient name-synchronicity to what it will do to you!

spacedcowboy• 1 year ago

Chemical nominative determinism at its best.

formerly_proven• 1 year ago

There’s also FOOOF and FOOOOF, as well as FOOOOOF

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_fluoride#

salgernon• 1 year ago

Kind of like CAR CAAR etc.

relwin• 1 year ago

YouTube chemists visit Dr. Kraus' fluorine lab in Germany: https://youtu.be/UzIH6raTxyE?si=74Pfn0i8Whq09Iim

speckx• 1 year ago

Relevant https://what-if.xkcd.com/40/

philipwhiuk• 1 year ago

Good old FOOF

zidad• 1 year ago

Found my next metal band name, thanks!

the__alchemist• 1 year ago

Ideally makes heavy use of pyrotechnics.

tonetegeatinst• 1 year ago

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.

api3• 1 year ago

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.

nottorp• 1 year ago

Ignition has that lovely paragraph about some fluorine based fuel leaking out of the truck that was transporting it* and going through the road surface and then through the half a meter of concrete and stone under the asphalt, alien style.

* the only way to move that fuel was in a refrigerated cistern... at a temp so low that the steel it was made of became brittle and cracked.

I think it's quoted in one of Derek Lowe's articles about fluorine compounds too.

perihelions3• 1 year ago

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo...

api3• 1 year ago

Retcon: the Xenomorphs were a form of life based around fluorine chemistry, which provides a physically plausible mechanism for how their blood eats through anything.

Of course that breaks the idea of them incubating in humans, since their biochemistry would react explosively with ours, but that never made sense anyway.

UncleSlacky• 1 year ago

Obligatory dowmload link: https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

perihelions3• 1 year ago

From memory, that book went in at least four different directions with fluorine compounds. Parts are about increasing specific impulse; parts are about increasing density impulse (fluorine's very dense); parts are about formulating oxidizers hypergolic with kerosene or with hydrogen; parts are about formulating oxidizers for deep space probes, with a melting/boiling point range matched to that thermal environment.

O3F2 is the one that if you add it to liquid oxygen, it makes hydrogen/oxygen combustion hypergolic.

Direct link: (.pdf) https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

api3• 1 year ago

O3F2 is the one that if you add it to liquid oxygen, it makes hydrogen/oxygen combustion hypergolic.

O3F2 sounds like it'd be hypergolic with engineers. Nope.

wiredfool3• 1 year ago

There's also adding a bit of Flourine to one of the Fuming Nitric Acids to make it easier to handle, because of the flouridation of the surface of the tanks.

chasd00• 1 year ago

a book called Ignition

that book is really good and has some interesting hidden treasures, like a couple of sentences about adding silicon oil to the fuel mixture to create a self-ablating film on the combustion chamber. I think some amateur bi-prop engine guys use that in their fuel setups. It's funny how the book ends after all that research and exotic chemicals with JP-1 and liquid O2 are still pretty much the best combination.

wiredfool3• 1 year ago

And the bit about using dimethyl mercury as a monopropellant.

pazimzadeh• 1 year ago

hopefully this isn't trending because of the recent controversy about fluoride in tap water?

tverbeure• 1 year ago

I will always reread the story about Satan's Kimchi.

RandomBacon• 1 year ago

Bit rot: the article links to http://www.lateralscience.co.uk which is now just an advertisement for online gambling.

philipkglass• 1 year ago

Here's a good snapshot of that page as it appeared in 2010, when this article linked to it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100430182802/http://www.latera...

cwillu• 1 year ago

FOOF, not to be confused with the FLOOF's that everyone wants to work with

cperciva• 1 year ago

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

sortalongo• 1 year ago

433 kcal/mole

For reference, TNT is 1kcal/g. This is 6.2 kcal/g.

moffkalast• 1 year ago

Less of a FOOF and more of a BOOM

__MatrixMan__• 1 year ago

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...

mmonaghan• 1 year ago

I love Derek Lowe's writing. I think I've read most of his articles but this series is my favorite.

narrator• 1 year ago

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.

credit_guy• 1 year ago

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...

dfox• 1 year ago

These are mixtures of fluorine and oxygen, not FOOF.

BizarroLand• 1 year ago

What is the difference between F2O2 and FOOF? Just the structure?

jandrewrogers• 1 year ago

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octanitrocubane

stuaxo• 1 year ago

2010 being 15 years ago is making me feel pretty ancient.

tim333• 1 year ago

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)

Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride (2010)

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