Now I'm imagining some alien hobbyist in a Type II civilization, millions of lightyears away, furiously trying to grow perfectly hexagonal basalt crystals. Or, better yet, some alien hobbyist in a Type III civilization, billions of lightyears away, furiously trying to get the polar clouds of a gas giant to form a perfect hexagon. Ya know what they say about hexagons...
There are no-hackery-required temp controllers out there already. Inkbird is a popular brand and run 30-40 USD. The are commonly used to make kegerators and there are two outlet versions so you can also control a heater at the same time. Input your desired temp range and it will control the power to the device directly. I've used them to both make a chest freezer into a refrigerator and to keep one running colder than it normally would. As always I love the videos!
if you are reading this, buy a variable frequency drive / or build one and hook it to the micro-controller such as Arduino /esp32 to control those freezer compressor speed for adjusting the temperature response smoothly.
To get a stable temperature, maybe use a heated metal block to work against the freezer - us a PID controller to control the heater, avoiding any need to modify the freezer.
Homebrewers use a chest freezer to make a controlled temperature environment (use a cheap one without a defrost cycle). You could take the top off and put a clear cover (or an insulated cover with a clear port). Use a pdi controller and include many large blocks of ice to provide a thermal ballast. One of the troubles with your freezer is that it was practically empty.
When I was a kid growing up in Alaska, there were different types of snow crystals that you could find. For example, when there was several feet of snow on the ground, and the outside air temperature was somewhere around -40, if you dug down to the ground level, you would find crystals that could be a quarter inch in size. Mostly I remember hexagonal needles and you could feel the hexagonal 'stem' through your gloves. Another great place to find big ice crystals was near a sink-hole. The decaying plant matter inside the sink hole would create an updraft of warmer air along the edges. The crystals would grow out from the edge of the snow at the top of the hole. Some crystals could be an inch in length and were often flattened needles an inch in length.
With your dedication, you deserve way more subscribers. It's quite inspiring tbh. Btw I also broke a freezer in just the same, very dumb way. Wasn't for such a cool project though, I just thought I would be able to get around defrosting it properly... well but in the end, it defrosted anyways :/
I actually enjoyed this 'BTS' version more than the main presentation, getting to see your process evolve as you conquered previous results. I wouldn't call them outright failures, but that is the cyclic nature of discovering a process. I've been working with graphene the last few years after a stint with jet engines and became fascinated with single crystal metallic structures for a time. Throughout that journey, I researched a number of like processes that people have built upon, though the guy that really went for it in his field was Kenneth G. Libbrecht, the 'designer snowflake guy'. While this is about as far as polar opposites as you can get in end result, I learned a lot from him in things I'd like to adapt to future graphenic structures when I get to theory testing time, hopefully in the next year or so.
@@max_kl The ice only sublimates if it's exposed iirc. After the comet passes close to the sun I imagine it would sublimate and produce some crystals though.
If I was to attempt this experiment, I would probably start around building a cold plate freezer with a 3 phase compressor and controlling that compressor with a VFD. The cold plate would attach to the bottom of the vacuum chamber, and inside the chamber have a copper pedestal that sits above the waterline. Use resistive heaters to keep the water in the chamber barely in the liquid state. If the chamber was taller, it could be possible to keep sufficient distance between the heated window and the experiment to minimize it's influence on the experiment. Then just put the entire apparatus in a sealed and insulated box and monitor it from the camera/sensor feeds. This would allow one to "tune" the crystal growth operation with minimal disruption.
You gave me a mild case of PTSD. 35 years ago I took a grad class on phase transformations in metals and alloys It was four months of studying phase diagrams and theorizing why they look like they do. Until this video, I don't think I thought about a phase diagram since then. We rarely consult those in IT.
I think a series just on growing crystals with different compounds would be cool. There are quite a few things that can form crystals, and I know that colorful compounds like copper sulfate and bismuth metal look good as crystals. You could take that time to also explain how the structure of a molecule can make different crystal patterns, like how some chemicals form long, needle-like crystals when crystalized out of solution. Maybe you've already covered this in some form, but it's a cool idea.
I feel like there has to be a really complicated machine which can regulate the amount of a substance in it's gas phase and keep the temperature/pressure constant so that it can easily deposit on a substrate. Hmmm if only we knew where to find one... *cough* molecular beam epitaxy *cough* . I realize this wouldn't work for what you are trying to do but I thought it was funny that the MBE is literally the machine for controlled crystalline growth. Seriously great videos, love the subjects you are covering and I can't wait to see more
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel Expensive idea, but just putting it out there. Maybe if the vacuum chamber was re-designed to more actively control both heat and pressure? Improvise a way to extract heat from the vacuum chamber directly, rather than just putting it in a freezer. A pot with heat sinks or another type of cooling system. And better sensors and controls on the pressure control. Build a microcontroller to monitor all that, perhaps integrate a camera system into it. And make a room with more precise climate control to do this in, or even a commercial walk in freezer, which would be useful for other experiments as well. Or a smaller custom scientific freezer for this sort of thing. There could be a world of new stuff in water crystals like this we don't even know about, until we try. I know you are burned out on the project, but don't abandon it entirely. This is interesting.
You should post a bunch of youtube shorts about the ice forming and other visually cool stuff. Apparently they are the new hotness in the platform. Maybe that can get you a bunch more subs, because your content is pretty amazing already, so... Keep the work!
I’m planning to - I also have a lot of timelapses that would do real well as shorts cause they loop. I’m currently struggling with weather I release them here or on an “AlphaPhoenixShorts” channel. I don’t want to pollute this channel with lots of reused content, but I also want to bring people to THIS channel where I’ve already put in years of effort...
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel yes i understand the hassle. RUclips shorts is not a very mature idea now... I would say use this channel, i don't mind seeing one more 30 secs video in my recommendations and even if reused, that kind of stuff is pretty cool, so i would watch it again. Maybe make a community poll (😏😏) asking people if they would mind. You have potential, i want to see you grow big to enjoy even more high quality videos. Good luck!
Totally fascinating!! I know you probably don't want to do this experiment again so soon. But this would of been neat to of seen how these might have looked if you used some sort of coloring agent that can transport with water vapor if able to. Seeing more of the shapes with a magenta dye/pigment could be super neat. Or if it can't be vaporized then maybe dripping in some dye every once in a while. It might of shown some more of the details of the crystals besides the light reflecting off from it. Maybe hopeful wishing at least! Thank you for a fabulously enjoyable video!!!
Yay! This is what I originally came here for! really really cool. I hope we get to see a second attempt with a better set up in the future c: not that this is the only thing i'd wanna see from this channel though, all the other videos are great too
You can get PID temperature controllers, plug out up to a relay to contol power to your chest freezer. The ones coming from China are really well priced (i used one on my oven to replace it's faulty capillary thermostat and it's FANTASTIC). It can cycle power just nice to match the heat loss so that the temperature is maintained very very well.
The thermostat of our freezer broke, fortunately in the "on" position. Replaced it with a thermostat module, was pretty easy and works great. I think it could be useful for this as you could control the temperature of the Water or other parts of the experiment instead of just the inside air temperature.
This entire series put's me in mind of Dennis Taylor's Bobiverse, and how the printers in that universe works. Supposedly, if you can get carbon nanotubes tuned correctly, you can railgun single atoms down them and into the exact spot that you want them to bond. Has anyone any experience that might tell whether that's possible?
Dendritic growth of ice crystals, AKA surface hoar, is a major risk factor for avalanches. Those feathery crystals, once buried by additional snowfall, make for an extremely weak interface between two slabs of snowpack, and for extremely highly sensitive avalanche conditions.
Just recently came across this channel and I'm oh-so-glad I did! It's certainly an (ice) diamond in the rough! Lol, see what I did there? 🤣 Anyway, you've got a new, happy subscriber and I hope this Channel blows up soon like I think it deserves! Keep up the good work. Cheers, mate! - Jesse
Amazing video as always! I was only introduced to your channel last month, so you may already have a video on this, but I still wanted to leave a comment: I got really into making cocktails a few years ago, which meant a lot of time trying to make perfect ice. My goal was large cubes with high clarity, and the technique I eventually settled on was to fill a cooler with water, place the cooler uncovered in my freezer, remove the cooler when ice had formed a sufficiently thick sheet, drain the water from beneath the sheet, and saw the sheet into cubes. The technique worked great, no matter whether the water was filtered, boiled, or straight from the tap. Why do you think this works? My guess is that the imperfections form when liquid water trapped by already-formed ice freezes and expands, causing internal breaks in the crystal structure. Cheers!
You can get a thermostat that will cut power and reenable it at a set temperature. They are used for brewing but I use them for science and steaks. It will give you fine control within a degree or two.
As I remember, counterintuitively, the shape that your crystal grows into depends on the direction of slowest growth. So I imagine the c direction is the slowest to grow. Hence the picture of a hexagonal prism taller than it is wide is probably not possible because the crystal will grow outwards faster than upwards.
Veritasium has a great video on snowflake growth, and gets to work with a scientist actually growing snowflakes. The crystal growth is very dependent on the exact temp and humidity.
If Technology Connections is to be believed, things would probably be improved by using a chest freezer, rather than a standing unit on a refrigerator.
Sounds like you’d want a PID controller to keep the “air” at -1C. Either using a variable-displacement compressor, or just a bunch of peltiers. Directly cooling the vacuum chamber, not in a freezer, maybe in a fridge. If there are “inverter” freezers out there, they’d be a good target for altering the control loop. Another idea is to use a variable frequency drive to power a regular freezer. A simple TRIAC circuit might work too, maybe. -2 - -4 degrees is under shooting I’d say, you should be able to get more accurate than that so long as you go for a good thermal sensor.
maybe a large body of ice inside the freezer next to the setup, to decrease fluctuations in Temperature could help. Also maybe a big insulator like a piece of plastic to fill some volume inside the vacuum chamber.
you ever try growing giant cubic salt crystals? I've tried to at home and had very limited success. I think I've run into similar basic issues. I need to take longer and control conditions more closely. it's amazing the step in complexity from forming small, visible crystals to forming big, hold in your hand crystals
Fascinating video! I'd love to see what these look like filmed with a polarized light source and an adjustable polarizing filter on your camera. I wonder if you could see the deposition layers in the ice crystal.
Would supercooling distilled water to allow you to control the nucleation sites work? If I understand correctly, polycrystalline ice is formed due to there being many nucleation sites and monocrystalline ice is formed when there is only one, but there may be something that I'm missing here
I might try growing crystals right below 0°C - considering that large volumes of water maintain the thaw point for long times until everything is frozen.
I think you should avoid the large pool of ice/water and associated wear on vacuum pump, and make a way to introduce water via a small valve, maintaining a more controlled environment. Forget the freezer appliance and peltier, get something supercooled. Maybe someone in hvac could help.
I know this is an expensive suggestion, but you might want to look into a refrigerated circulator (Julabo/Neslab/Polyscience). I have found a couple on ebay for under a grand. You would be able to maintain a temperature bang on with one of those.
I had an epiphany! I need a friend with a high vacuum system and an electron microscope....or 2 🤪 I'm also imagining an alternate version of myself with a girlfriend who would come home complaining the ice maker was broken (again) only to discover my jamming of the ice maker for the sake of sciences!
I wonder if you could avoid messing with the freezer's own control range by using an mcu and, when it sensed the temp was rising (normal off-cycle or defrost cycle), it merely switched a relay off and on (just your own socket, no need to work with the freezer's internal parts). That split second might reset the freezer so, at power-up, the compressor's back in gear. (On a related note: We got a separate top-loading freezer during covid for some extra food storage. That has no defrost cycle, and is kinda nice (ice-buildup aside), because food doesn't get the damage from the defrost temperatures. Preserves things much better without the high-level of 'freezer burn', and associated delicious freezer-burn taste.)
11:15 Yeah I had expected that you would keep that vacuum pump going for this reason. I expect the pressure to increase a lot from when you pumped it initially
Hi, puddles of water would freeze overnight and create giant 30°60°90° triangles of ice. Some of them hollow! I don't know the temp and pressure variables, sorry. Great channel btw.
Just an idle thought, but could the quantity of water vapor be reduced by merely reducing the available surface area for sublimation via something simple like ping pong balls? Would make it potentially easier to get fewer but larger crystals?
I know nothing about what I assume are the numerous factors that go into determining sizes of crystals, but it does seem that crystals tend to have a degree of size limitation in natural formations. I also know that large single crystal silicon for semiconductor wafers are grown under very tightly controlled conditions, which are technically challenging to maintain. I expect to accomplish what you have attempted here, if it is possible, would require some very specialized equipment.
One of your mistakes Is the freezer being empty. They are not designed to run constantly without burning the pump out. To maintain a temperature more reliably fill any gaps of dead air with ice or other frozen things. Otherwise every time you open the door your starting over form scratch. Even if its just a old milk jug filled with water it will act as a cold battery to keep things from getting hot when the freezer pump needs to rest.
Fantastic videos ! Could the clump of faceted crystals in the end of your last video be considered a true single crystal or would this constitute a highly textured polycrystalline material? Thinking out loud here, the freezing and heating cycles of the freezer might lead to regions forming with a poor interface between them. It does seem like if those regions exist it does not disturb the epitaxial relationship of the layer that is growing. Very curious about how the microstructure would look like!
So, do you think you could just make a tiny freezer with the peltier things? A tiny freezer super insulated, controlled only by precise electrical control?
What about using a copper heatpipe(machined to perfectly point cone) with one side chilled with peltier and acetone sealead away from a bath of warmer constant water?i think it will crystallize better in liquid than in air just difficult to maintain the nucleation poit on the chilled copper rod
Perhaps salt water ice can be used to keep the temperature constant. Also do you use the crystals from your previous experiments to seed your following experiments?
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
Now I'm imagining some alien hobbyist in a Type II civilization, millions of lightyears away, furiously trying to grow perfectly hexagonal basalt crystals. Or, better yet, some alien hobbyist in a Type III civilization, billions of lightyears away, furiously trying to get the polar clouds of a gas giant to form a perfect hexagon. Ya know what they say about hexagons...
They're the bestagons!
They’re hexagonal
Ah, a fellow Kurzgesagt viewer!
Wait aren't the polar clouds on Saturn already hexagonal?
Couldn't WE make basalt crystals?
"most snowflakes are infact not manually grown in vacuum chambers in the clouds"
MOST, what arent you telling us?
Muahaha
He's the one that makes the snow that we see :o
"Space snow" xD
DON'T QUESTION IT!!!!!!! * They'll hear you *
“Would i be thrilled to answer emails as long as I don’t have to do it? YES”
dude, that’s EXTREMELY relatable for some reason
Use a chest freezer (no defrost), and add an external thermostatic control that switches its AC line.
Technology connections gang
@@I-Am-L yep XD
There are no-hackery-required temp controllers out there already. Inkbird is a popular brand and run 30-40 USD. The are commonly used to make kegerators and there are two outlet versions so you can also control a heater at the same time.
Input your desired temp range and it will control the power to the device directly. I've used them to both make a chest freezer into a refrigerator and to keep one running colder than it normally would.
As always I love the videos!
Good tip!
I've often thought that growing my own crystals would be a fun project some day. Your series of videos has profoundly changed my mind. 😁
The only channel that could get me to watch ice form for ~30 mins... Great video!
also easily one of the most underrated channels on YT
I REALLY wish i knew how to be rated then...
Real experimental perseverance Brian. Your videos are all excellent.
Thanks! I still want to return to this project with better temp control…
if you are reading this, buy a variable frequency drive / or build one and hook it to the micro-controller such as Arduino /esp32 to control those freezer compressor speed for adjusting the temperature response smoothly.
I got sucked into this channel from Steve Mould's shoutout. The payoff was well worth the wait.
Why are you depriving us of the pleasure of seeing these crystals in polarized light?
the much needed sequel
thanks!
To get a stable temperature, maybe use a heated metal block to work against the freezer - us a PID controller to control the heater, avoiding any need to modify the freezer.
Homebrewers use a chest freezer to make a controlled temperature environment (use a cheap one without a defrost cycle). You could take the top off and put a clear cover (or an insulated cover with a clear port). Use a pdi controller and include many large blocks of ice to provide a thermal ballast. One of the troubles with your freezer is that it was practically empty.
your channel is incredibly underrated. i legit feel like how i felt when i saw destins earlier videos. or integza. bruh this is too legit
When I was a kid growing up in Alaska, there were different types of snow crystals that you could find. For example, when there was several feet of snow on the ground, and the outside air temperature was somewhere around -40, if you dug down to the ground level, you would find crystals that could be a quarter inch in size. Mostly I remember hexagonal needles and you could feel the hexagonal 'stem' through your gloves. Another great place to find big ice crystals was near a sink-hole. The decaying plant matter inside the sink hole would create an updraft of warmer air along the edges. The crystals would grow out from the edge of the snow at the top of the hole. Some crystals could be an inch in length and were often flattened needles an inch in length.
With your dedication, you deserve way more subscribers. It's quite inspiring tbh.
Btw I also broke a freezer in just the same, very dumb way. Wasn't for such a cool project though, I just thought I would be able to get around defrosting it properly... well but in the end, it defrosted anyways :/
I was playing Kerbal Space Program while watching this and got really confused when Arcadia by Kevin McLeod started playing at 9:47.
Same! Was hearing two kerbal instrumentals playing at the same time.
I actually enjoyed this 'BTS' version more than the main presentation, getting to see your process evolve as you conquered previous results. I wouldn't call them outright failures, but that is the cyclic nature of discovering a process.
I've been working with graphene the last few years after a stint with jet engines and became fascinated with single crystal metallic structures for a time. Throughout that journey, I researched a number of like processes that people have built upon, though the guy that really went for it in his field was Kenneth G. Libbrecht, the 'designer snowflake guy'. While this is about as far as polar opposites as you can get in end result, I learned a lot from him in things I'd like to adapt to future graphenic structures when I get to theory testing time, hopefully in the next year or so.
I wonder how would ice crystals on surfaces of comets would look
ooooh interesting question!
Or what about the ice formed on the moon's poles? I imagine the ice on Europa and Enceladus is in more forms than the common Earth variety.
Wouldn't the ice just sublimate away?
@@max_kl The ice only sublimates if it's exposed iirc. After the comet passes close to the sun I imagine it would sublimate and produce some crystals though.
@@chnhakk yeah, maybe
This channel started to have great my ranking/subscriber rate with crazy crystal chemistry, astro photography, university lab videos.
You're doing amazing work by sharing all of this. Looking forward to your future endeavors.
I absolutely love your subtitle on this video. I died and was reborn a physics student.
We won't leave it as it is! One big hexagon is needed!
If I was to attempt this experiment, I would probably start around building a cold plate freezer with a 3 phase compressor and controlling that compressor with a VFD. The cold plate would attach to the bottom of the vacuum chamber, and inside the chamber have a copper pedestal that sits above the waterline. Use resistive heaters to keep the water in the chamber barely in the liquid state.
If the chamber was taller, it could be possible to keep sufficient distance between the heated window and the experiment to minimize it's influence on the experiment. Then just put the entire apparatus in a sealed and insulated box and monitor it from the camera/sensor feeds. This would allow one to "tune" the crystal growth operation with minimal disruption.
You gave me a mild case of PTSD. 35 years ago I took a grad class on phase transformations in metals and alloys It was four months of studying phase diagrams and theorizing why they look like they do. Until this video, I don't think I thought about a phase diagram since then. We rarely consult those in IT.
Right after I watched the last one you post a new one
Speedy
I think a series just on growing crystals with different compounds would be cool. There are quite a few things that can form crystals, and I know that colorful compounds like copper sulfate and bismuth metal look good as crystals. You could take that time to also explain how the structure of a molecule can make different crystal patterns, like how some chemicals form long, needle-like crystals when crystalized out of solution. Maybe you've already covered this in some form, but it's a cool idea.
I feel like there has to be a really complicated machine which can regulate the amount of a substance in it's gas phase and keep the temperature/pressure constant so that it can easily deposit on a substrate. Hmmm if only we knew where to find one... *cough* molecular beam epitaxy *cough* . I realize this wouldn't work for what you are trying to do but I thought it was funny that the MBE is literally the machine for controlled crystalline growth. Seriously great videos, love the subjects you are covering and I can't wait to see more
One would think 😂
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel Expensive idea, but just putting it out there. Maybe if the vacuum chamber was re-designed to more actively control both heat and pressure? Improvise a way to extract heat from the vacuum chamber directly, rather than just putting it in a freezer. A pot with heat sinks or another type of cooling system. And better sensors and controls on the pressure control. Build a microcontroller to monitor all that, perhaps integrate a camera system into it.
And make a room with more precise climate control to do this in, or even a commercial walk in freezer, which would be useful for other experiments as well. Or a smaller custom scientific freezer for this sort of thing.
There could be a world of new stuff in water crystals like this we don't even know about, until we try.
I know you are burned out on the project, but don't abandon it entirely. This is interesting.
the KSP space music hits hard
You should post a bunch of youtube shorts about the ice forming and other visually cool stuff. Apparently they are the new hotness in the platform. Maybe that can get you a bunch more subs, because your content is pretty amazing already, so... Keep the work!
I’m planning to - I also have a lot of timelapses that would do real well as shorts cause they loop. I’m currently struggling with weather I release them here or on an “AlphaPhoenixShorts” channel. I don’t want to pollute this channel with lots of reused content, but I also want to bring people to THIS channel where I’ve already put in years of effort...
@@AlphaPhoenixChannel yes i understand the hassle. RUclips shorts is not a very mature idea now... I would say use this channel, i don't mind seeing one more 30 secs video in my recommendations and even if reused, that kind of stuff is pretty cool, so i would watch it again. Maybe make a community poll (😏😏) asking people if they would mind. You have potential, i want to see you grow big to enjoy even more high quality videos. Good luck!
Totally fascinating!! I know you probably don't want to do this experiment again so soon. But this would of been neat to of seen how these might have looked if you used some sort of coloring agent that can transport with water vapor if able to. Seeing more of the shapes with a magenta dye/pigment could be super neat. Or if it can't be vaporized then maybe dripping in some dye every once in a while. It might of shown some more of the details of the crystals besides the light reflecting off from it. Maybe hopeful wishing at least! Thank you for a fabulously enjoyable video!!!
"I'm pulling it out it's been 6 months"
"man i wish I would've left it in there for another week!"
lmao
Yay! This is what I originally came here for! really really cool. I hope we get to see a second attempt with a better set up in the future c:
not that this is the only thing i'd wanna see from this channel though, all the other videos are great too
This is amazing and it is beautiful!
You can get PID temperature controllers, plug out up to a relay to contol power to your chest freezer. The ones coming from China are really well priced (i used one on my oven to replace it's faulty capillary thermostat and it's FANTASTIC). It can cycle power just nice to match the heat loss so that the temperature is maintained very very well.
I really enjoy the use of the Destiny music, took my back to some fun times.
Chest freezers are 1. Cheap, and 2. Don’t have thaw cycles usually
Crispix hey, I see you're a man of taste
Why do you have so few subs? Your channel is great!
The thermostat of our freezer broke, fortunately in the "on" position. Replaced it with a thermostat module, was pretty easy and works great. I think it could be useful for this as you could control the temperature of the Water or other parts of the experiment instead of just the inside air temperature.
i am so relieved that other people have desks as messy as mine
This entire series put's me in mind of Dennis Taylor's Bobiverse, and how the printers in that universe works. Supposedly, if you can get carbon nanotubes tuned correctly, you can railgun single atoms down them and into the exact spot that you want them to bond. Has anyone any experience that might tell whether that's possible?
Dendritic growth of ice crystals, AKA surface hoar, is a major risk factor for avalanches. Those feathery crystals, once buried by additional snowfall, make for an extremely weak interface between two slabs of snowpack, and for extremely highly sensitive avalanche conditions.
Interesting!
Just recently came across this channel and I'm oh-so-glad I did! It's certainly an (ice) diamond in the rough! Lol, see what I did there? 🤣
Anyway, you've got a new, happy subscriber and I hope this Channel blows up soon like I think it deserves!
Keep up the good work.
Cheers, mate!
- Jesse
@4:48 Yay for automatic defrost! If you had a chest freezer without defrost, it wouldn't do that.
Exactly
Amazing video as always! I was only introduced to your channel last month, so you may already have a video on this, but I still wanted to leave a comment:
I got really into making cocktails a few years ago, which meant a lot of time trying to make perfect ice. My goal was large cubes with high clarity, and the technique I eventually settled on was to fill a cooler with water, place the cooler uncovered in my freezer, remove the cooler when ice had formed a sufficiently thick sheet, drain the water from beneath the sheet, and saw the sheet into cubes. The technique worked great, no matter whether the water was filtered, boiled, or straight from the tap.
Why do you think this works? My guess is that the imperfections form when liquid water trapped by already-formed ice freezes and expands, causing internal breaks in the crystal structure.
Cheers!
For anyone looking to replicate: long skinny crystals are great for tall glasses :)
You can get a thermostat that will cut power and reenable it at a set temperature. They are used for brewing but I use them for science and steaks. It will give you fine control within a degree or two.
As I remember, counterintuitively, the shape that your crystal grows into depends on the direction of slowest growth. So I imagine the c direction is the slowest to grow. Hence the picture of a hexagonal prism taller than it is wide is probably not possible because the crystal will grow outwards faster than upwards.
Veritasium has a great video on snowflake growth, and gets to work with a scientist actually growing snowflakes. The crystal growth is very dependent on the exact temp and humidity.
If Technology Connections is to be believed, things would probably be improved by using a chest freezer, rather than a standing unit on a refrigerator.
I once saw very pretty ice crystals inside a cup of water left outside in freezing temperatures
I wonder how regular ice would compare in density, weight, and strength to a single crystal that grew to enormous size?
For a monochrystal you should do it with a "Seed". Like they do with silicon to produce IC's.
Sounds like you’d want a PID controller to keep the “air” at -1C. Either using a variable-displacement compressor, or just a bunch of peltiers. Directly cooling the vacuum chamber, not in a freezer, maybe in a fridge. If there are “inverter” freezers out there, they’d be a good target for altering the control loop. Another idea is to use a variable frequency drive to power a regular freezer. A simple TRIAC circuit might work too, maybe. -2 - -4 degrees is under shooting I’d say, you should be able to get more accurate than that so long as you go for a good thermal sensor.
Sorry it didn't work out! Well I always wondered why we don't see faceted ice crystals, I learned a lot.
maybe a large body of ice inside the freezer next to the setup, to decrease fluctuations in Temperature could help. Also maybe a big insulator like a piece of plastic to fill some volume inside the vacuum chamber.
you ever try growing giant cubic salt crystals? I've tried to at home and had very limited success. I think I've run into similar basic issues. I need to take longer and control conditions more closely. it's amazing the step in complexity from forming small, visible crystals to forming big, hold in your hand crystals
Very cool, thanks for the efforts! I came here in researching Mount Girnar. Just sayin'. :D
Fascinating video! I'd love to see what these look like filmed with a polarized light source and an adjustable polarizing filter on your camera. I wonder if you could see the deposition layers in the ice crystal.
Would supercooling distilled water to allow you to control the nucleation sites work? If I understand correctly, polycrystalline ice is formed due to there being many nucleation sites and monocrystalline ice is formed when there is only one, but there may be something that I'm missing here
what are the framed metal plates in your background from?
I might try growing crystals right below 0°C - considering that large volumes of water maintain the thaw point for long times until everything is frozen.
I think you should avoid the large pool of ice/water and associated wear on vacuum pump, and make a way to introduce water via a small valve, maintaining a more controlled environment. Forget the freezer appliance and peltier, get something supercooled. Maybe someone in hvac could help.
They're so pretty!! 😭
I know this is an expensive suggestion, but you might want to look into a refrigerated circulator (Julabo/Neslab/Polyscience). I have found a couple on ebay for under a grand. You would be able to maintain a temperature bang on with one of those.
Maybe you could update the part 1 video description with a link to this one? :)
Men in an alternate universe you overdosed! happy to see You here as an undergrad, then on the news dead! Keep it up!
Hexagons are the bestagons
I wonder if putting a small fan inside the chamber would help? It would possibly allow the vapor molecules to move around more
It could be tricky to power one, but that sounds like and interesting idea
I had an epiphany! I need a friend with a high vacuum system and an electron microscope....or 2 🤪
I'm also imagining an alternate version of myself with a girlfriend who would come home complaining the ice maker was broken (again) only to discover my jamming of the ice maker for the sake of sciences!
Love the giants corsway
I wonder if you could avoid messing with the freezer's own control range by using an mcu and, when it sensed the temp was rising (normal off-cycle or defrost cycle), it merely switched a relay off and on (just your own socket, no need to work with the freezer's internal parts). That split second might reset the freezer so, at power-up, the compressor's back in gear. (On a related note: We got a separate top-loading freezer during covid for some extra food storage. That has no defrost cycle, and is kinda nice (ice-buildup aside), because food doesn't get the damage from the defrost temperatures. Preserves things much better without the high-level of 'freezer burn', and associated delicious freezer-burn taste.)
11:15 Yeah I had expected that you would keep that vacuum pump going for this reason. I expect the pressure to increase a lot from when you pumped it initially
I personally like long videos, like 30-60 min long.
I personally like long videos, like 35-40 min long.
I do too! But there needs to be enough content for hour long content, a video like this would have to be stretched very thin to get to that
Reminds me of the pillars in Giant's Causeway structures.
I clicked this hoping for ice ii but this was really cool anyway xD
Title game stronk!
I was pretty pleased with this one...
try adding a huge heatsink into the freezer so when it cycles the temperature is more stable. Like 10 12*12*1/2 inch steel plates or something.
I wish you gave a shot with a very bright light, it might be wonderful!
Hi, puddles of water would freeze overnight and create giant 30°60°90° triangles of ice. Some of them hollow!
I don't know the temp and pressure variables, sorry. Great channel btw.
Just an idle thought, but could the quantity of water vapor be reduced by merely reducing the available surface area for sublimation via something simple like ping pong balls? Would make it potentially easier to get fewer but larger crystals?
ok now try a Czochralski pull single crystal boule of ice!
Sounds cool!
That would probably be be an even more complicated process though…
I know nothing about what I assume are the numerous factors that go into determining sizes of crystals, but it does seem that crystals tend to have a degree of size limitation in natural formations. I also know that large single crystal silicon for semiconductor wafers are grown under very tightly controlled conditions, which are technically challenging to maintain. I expect to accomplish what you have attempted here, if it is possible, would require some very specialized equipment.
6 more months! 6 more months! 6 more months!
Nice, ice!
Love the KSP music
Maybe use a dilute ice-saltwater bath around the vacuum chamber to get a more consistent temperature?
very very cool
I am sure you know that the defrost cycle of your freezer was doing what it was designed to do. The heat trace cable can be unplugged.
is there anything u could coat the glass with to make it resistant to water building up?? i cant really think of anything
One of your mistakes Is the freezer being empty. They are not designed to run constantly without burning the pump out. To maintain a temperature more reliably fill any gaps of dead air with ice or other frozen things. Otherwise every time you open the door your starting over form scratch. Even if its just a old milk jug filled with water it will act as a cold battery to keep things from getting hot when the freezer pump needs to rest.
Fantastic videos ! Could the clump of faceted crystals in the end of your last video be considered a true single crystal or would this constitute a highly textured polycrystalline material? Thinking out loud here, the freezing and heating cycles of the freezer might lead to regions forming with a poor interface between them. It does seem like if those regions exist it does not disturb the epitaxial relationship of the layer that is growing. Very curious about how the microstructure would look like!
Great vid!!!!
So, do you think you could just make a tiny freezer with the peltier things? A tiny freezer super insulated, controlled only by precise electrical control?
What about using a copper heatpipe(machined to perfectly point cone) with one side chilled with peltier and acetone sealead away from a bath of warmer constant water?i think it will crystallize better in liquid than in air just difficult to maintain the nucleation poit on the chilled copper rod
bestagonal snow hell yeah
Perhaps salt water ice can be used to keep the temperature constant. Also do you use the crystals from your previous experiments to seed your following experiments?
In reading a book on the topic, I vaguely recall rabbit hair being a key ingredient... leibrecht or w.e.