Talk:Liquid oxygen

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molecular weight

shouldn't it be: 31.9998(6)g/mol

Misc Questions

If you had, say...a pool full of liquid oxygen, could you swim in it and still breathe?

No, you would freeze. However, there do exist breathable liquids which contain high concentrations of oxygen.

Our chemistry lecture made us ice-cream using LOx. Would that count as a use? =D

Your teacher probably used liquid nitrogen rather than liquid oxygen. liquid oxygen is pretty explosive and not that common, whereas liquid nitrogen is inert and relatively easy to get a hold of and is often used to make 'novelty' ice cream! -- Quantockgoblin (talk) 23:53, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A few years back I had access to a large quantity of LOX and routinely used to to mess around. One of the ideas that my friends and I came up with was to make LOX ice cream in the hopes that the ice cream would be flammable or explosive. In reality, it is actually very easy to make ice cream with LOX just like with LN2 since they are roughly the same temperature and act in roughly the same way. There is nothing dangerous about using LOX to make ice cream. When we tried to light the frozen ice cream with a lighter, it didn't do anything. The water content was far too high and the fat content far too low to cause any sort of combustion. We even made a "modified" ice cream with TONS more sugar and oil and very little water - but even the small amount of water in the heavy cream was enough to prevent the LOX ice cream from igniting. --24.160.20.29 (talk) 17:59, 18 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

how long does LOX take to evaporate in the open air?

That depends on the shape and insulating properties of the vessel, and the warmth of the air. If you poured a cup or so of liquid oxyen on the floor (use insulated pants in case some of it splashes on you) it would evaporate essentially on contact with the floor. If you left it in the cup, it would boil violently, and be all gone within a few minutes. If you put in an insulated narrow mounthed jar, it might last for a considerable length of time.

Liquid Oxygen

How do you transform gaseous oxygen to liquid oxygen?

The process of creating liquid air involves the compression, cooling, and then rapid expansion of an air column. The compression heats the gas adiabatically, then the air is allowed to cool back down to ambient, ridding it of most of its thermal energy. The column is then decompressed, and therefore the air cools to the condensation point, again adiabatically. See the article on liquid air. The liquid air so produced is mostly liquid nitrogen, but the oxygen, which has a higher boiling point than nitrogen, is fairly easily separated, for example by disstilation.

In summary, if you cool air enough, Lq oxygen will form -- Quantockgoblin (talk) 23:54, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

LOX on a grill

I debated adding this link to a youtube of people pouring LOX onto two charcoal grills, but figured I'd put it here first.

[1]

It's fairly impressive (and incendiary).--BlackAndy 01:32, 20 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've seen someone suspend a "ball" of Lq O2 between the poles of a horseshoe magnet and light it! Not for the faint hearted, but makes quite a spectacle! -- Quantockgoblin (talk) 00:02, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A citation would be great, a video clip even more so. What was the fuel for the oxygen "ball" set on fire? There are a few things such as stabilizing additives for ozone that would be interesting to have citations for. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.237.90.68 (talk) 13:01, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Safety

Any merit in mentioning LOX accumulation as a potential hazard during use of Schlenk-techniques?WhirlwindChemist (talk) 11:18, 29 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Added to cold trap - Quantockgoblin (talk) 23:55, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Odd sentence

"During World War II, liquid oxygen was used as an oxidizer in several Nazi Germany military rocket designs, under name A-Stoff and Sauerstoff." - surely Sauerstoff is simply the German word for oxygen? (see e.g. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauerstoff) Djr32 (talk) 21:01, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes.Pyrotec (talk) 17:41, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fahrenheit

Why in an English encyclopedia are temps not in Fahrenheit.

Is this a troll? Are you mad? Name one reason they should be in Farenheit? English language certainly has zero to do with it.178.15.151.163 (talk) 14:37, 16 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

SI units are used in science. Fahrenheit is pretty much only used in the US (by non-scientists) and in the older generation in the UK. -- Quantockgoblin (talk) 00:00, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Citations

I found a couple of sources that could be cited for the expansion ratio of liquid oxygen.

http://www.lindecanada.com/en/aboutboc/safety/cryogenic_liquids/characteristics.php

http://web.archive.org/web/20080607160832/http://www.chemistry.ohio-state.edu/ehs/handbook/gases/cryosafe.htm

--Humanist Geek (talk) 09:00, 24 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Added, thanks, though a non-archived version of the 2nd one would be better. Materialscientist (talk) 09:08, 24 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Why do you even need a source when you can calculate it from the density as a liquid, and the density at whatever temperature you desire? --Rifleman 82 (talk) 10:58, 24 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Inconsistency

This article is inconsistent on how it refers to liquid oxygen. It alternates between "liquid oxygen" and "LOX" purely on a whim. The terms mean the same thing, but it is annoying to see them alternating with each other so frequently. There are paragraphs where one sentence talks about "LOX" and the next about "liquid oxygen" offering no clue about why a different term was chosen. Is there a reason for this or is it simply because the contributors haven't settled on a single, consistent term? JIP | Talk 20:10, 15 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Presumably different editors wrote different sentences. It does look a mess. I tend to use both terms, but they tend to be context specific - I would not use the term LOx in a medical environment, but I could/would in a military environment. Pyrotec (talk) 20:44, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Expansion ratio

One sentence begins as follows:

"Liquid oxygen has an expansion ratio of 1:861 at 20 °C (68 °F)".

But wouldn't it be necessary to also specify the *pressure* in order to state the conditions under which there would be a particular expansion ratio?

Or is this quotation saying that at 20 °C, the expansion ratio is 1:861, regardless of the pressure? If so, this is a very questionable statement.Daqu (talk) 09:35, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well think about it: the statement actually states "Liquid oxygen has an expansion ratio of 1:861 at 20 °C (68 °F)" and it has a link to Expansion ratio as well as two citations. The article Expansion ratio defines the conditions as "at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure", the first citation does not give the conditions, but the second citation states "at 1 atmosphere". The article aught to state "at 1 atmosphere", but that information was readily available from the wikilink and one of the references. Perhaps your comment is intentionally questionable, as your restatement of the statement involved the removed the wikilink? Pyrotec (talk) 22:23, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I added the missing information to the article, just to make it clear(er). Thanks for highlighting the error. Pyrotec (talk) 21:05, 8 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]