Recreating one of the weirdest reactions

About a year ago I came across this video and it was one of the strangest

reactions

I had ever seen. It's called the Bella Usov Zabatinski reaction and it's one of the few good examples of an oscillating chemical reaction that existed at the time I saw it. I knew I had to do it myself and with a bit of searching I managed to find a decent recipe. The main ingredients required were sulfuric acid, sodium bromate, malonic acid and sodium bromide. Most of these are pretty easy to find places online. like on eBay, but malonic acid tends to be a little harder to come by and if you do find it, it's usually quite expensive.

I got really lucky and one day when I looked it up on eBay, someone was selling a bunch of it for a lot of money. cheap in any case there was still a final ingredient called phenanthraline ferrous sulfate or pheroin for short and this was only available from chemical companies however I found I could make it myself with just a couple of things from eBay. The first ingredient was ferrous sulfate. heptahydrate often used to adjust soil pH and increase plant iron levels. I didn't really need that much but for some reason I ended up ordering a five pound bag, the other ingredient was 110 monohydrate financially and I managed to get it. 10 grams for about 40 bucks so with that being said the basic goal of this video was to make the pheroin first and then make the beautiful usaf zabatinski.

The ferrous sulfate was dirty garden store quality and before using it I needed to clean it. So in a beaker I added 160 ml of water, turned on the stirring, and carefully poured in eight mils of concentrated sulfuric acid. Then I poured 120 grams of ferrous sulfate and turned on the heating. I probably could have added it all at once. but I ended up making it in several servings just to make sure it didn't mess up the stirring. I let it heat up to about 65C and at this point all the ferrous sulfate should have dissolved, the other stuff floating around was just impurities. that needed to be separated to do this, it was pretty simple and I just ran it through a coffee filter, although the first filtration was still a little cloudy so when I was done I ran it through the same filter again, it still wasn't completely clear but it was much better than before and I felt it was good enough when it was ready I covered the top with plastic wrap to protect it from the air then set it aside to cool and waited for the ferrous sulphate crystals to start .

In its place appeared, although a white, spongy solid began to precipitate. I think this was just ferric sulfate that formed when some of the ferrous sulfate was oxidized by the air. The ferric form is much less soluble than the ferrous, so it would make sense that it would be the first to be expelled when it reached room temperature I filtered it again and almost immediately some small crystals began to form at the bottom of the glass. This time it was actually ferrous sulfate and I just let it sit here undisturbed overnight so the crystals would crystallize.

Then I left it for a couple more days, but it didn't really seem to have changed much to make it crystallize more. I had to reduce the solubility and the easiest way to do that was to just put it in the refrigerator when I checked it again about a week later it looked like I had about double the amount. I spilled as much liquid as I could and at the bottom I was left with a good chunk of glass. I tried to get it out as one solid piece. but it didn't really seem to work, so I just had to tear it into pieces, which at first I thought was going to be really hard.

The crystals weren't as strong as I expected and it was actually relatively easy to break everything up and then pour it into a coffee filter with a paper towel to try to absorb some of the liquid that might be left. I only left it there for a few minutes because I didn't want the ferrous sulfate to start rusting. I put it all on a plate and then placed it in a vacuum desiccator, gave it almost a complete vacuum and let it dry for about five hours during this time, some of the crystals had turned white and I think it's just because a little A lot of ferrous sulfate heptahydrate had been dehydrated and some of its less hydrated forms, such as the monohydrate and anhydrous, are white instead of bluish green.

The final recovery was about 80 grams, which meant there were still about 40 grams left in the water. that I spilled, so this process here wasn't exactly super efficient, but I still ended up recovering a lot more than I needed, so it was good enough for me. Now I was ready to produce ferrous phenanthroline sulfate, which I will do from now on. In theory just called pheroin, this should be done in volumetric glassware, but in reality it didn't have to be super precise, so I settled for a graduated cylinder. I started by adding 0.7 grams of the ferrous sulfate I just purified, followed by 90 ml. of distilled water I mixed it until everything was dissolved and then added 1.5 grams of phenathylene monohydrate 110.

It immediately reacted with the ferrous sulfate to form a complex that had a nice red color. I then shook it until it was all dissolved, which actually took quite a while before it was ready, although I did wash the glass rod with a little water and topped it up to a hundred mils. I poured the blood red solution into a storage bottle and was now ready to perform the actual reaction I needed. To make three solutions which I will refer to simply as b and c for a, the original recipe called for sodium bromate, but at the last minute I realized that I accidentally called for potassium bromate, however, I thought it wasn't really a problem because It's mainly the bromate part that matters, potassium bromate has a slightly higher molar mass so I couldn't just add 5 grams and had to scale it appropriately.

This was pretty easy to do and I just divided the molar mass of the potassium bromate by the molar mass. mass of sodium bromate and multiplying that by 5. in any case to make a I added 67 ml of distilled water and poured in 5.6 grams of potassium bromate I turned on the stirring and when most of it had disappeared I poured two milliliters of concentrated sulfuric acid a few minutes later, the solution was completely clear and I went on to prepare solutions b and c, which were much simpler for b, I only added 1 gram of malonic acid and dissolved it in 10 ml of water and finally for c I dissolved one gram . of sodium bromide in 10 ml of water to run the reaction.

I just had to mix these solutions together with pheroin for the first run. I use six ml of one mil of b and 0.5 mil of c. There was no obvious reaction between a. and b, but the moment c was added, bromine began to be produced, this caused the solution to turn yellow-orange and I mixed it until it became colorless again after doing this several times, although I found that mixing it actually it doesn't do much and you can just leave it there in this, then I added a thousandth of pheroin, spun it and it quickly went through a good range of colors when it stopped changing and stayed this brownish red color.

I let it sit there and waited. The reaction ended up starting, but I was honestly quite disappointed because the point that was forming was actually not very nice to look at. This happened because the solution was too deep, so I discarded this run and did another one. I pipetted some of the liquid out though, which allowed me to hit the perfect amount. One thing I thought was cool is that sometimes when the solution is disturbed or mixed, it can temporarily turn back to blue in any case. This run was much better and the first point that formed had a nice blue ring around it.

This reaction isn't so slow that you can't just watch it and see what happens, but it's not very fast either, so I went. Go ahead and speed up this entire shot was taken over the course of about 35 minutes, the process that's happening here is extremely complicated and hasn't been fully explained one hundred percent, although it appears to be dominated by nine main

reactions

and me. I will do my best to explain them before I do, although let's recap what was in each solution in a there was sulfuric acid and potassium bromate in b there was malonic acid and in c there was sodium bromide when parts a b and c were mixed the concentration of the Bromide ions of sodium bromide was initially very high, the bromide ions reacted quickly with the bromate ions bro3 to form orange-colored bromine, this is the reason why the solution changed color before, when part c was added, the Bromine then reacted with malonic acid to produce bromomelonic acid and regenerated a bromide ion, although one bromide was recovered, there was still a total net loss of bromides from solution in another reaction, the bromide ions react with the bromates in a different way to produce bromic acid and hypobromic acid.

These reactions cause general depletion of bromide ions and because of this no more bromine can be produced. The malonic acid eventually uses up all the bromine and that is why after mixing the solutions, the bromine slowly disappeared leaving little or no bromide ions in the solution. Another process. is able to take over this reaction between bromate ions, pheroin and bromide acid. The main effect is the oxidation of the iron in pheroin, which takes it from its red two-plus form to its blue three-plus form. This reaction also produces more Bromine acid feeds back into its own reaction, this creates a positive feedback loop and causes this reaction to take over quickly;

However, there eventually comes a point where there are no more pheromones to oxidize, so you end up eliminating the excess bromine acid that was produced. It begins to dissociate into hypobromic acid and regenerates some of the bromate ions. These last three processes then begin to take over where malonic acid and bromomelonic acid reduce pheroin to its red two plus state. These reactions are much slower than the others. Although they only take over after the others have been turned off, their overall effect is to regenerate some bromide ions, allowing the cycle to repeat. It is capable of cycling many times, but the reagents run out slowly and when there is no malonic acid left in the pheroin it cannot be reduced to its red form, so if left long enough the entire pheromone gets stuck in its state three plus and the entire solution stays blue anyway.

I hope that was a decent explanation and that it was. It's not too confusing, I think the basic idea to remember is that it is a cycle between the oxidation and reduction of pheroin. I still have to explain why this reaction propagates like these waves. I think it is a quite complicated process and it is difficult to understand. Explain it concisely, but I'll do my best. The solution here does not mix, so the only way the ions move is by diffusion. However, bromide consumption is not perfectly uniform throughout the solution and at some points. It will develop a slight bromide deficiency, this creates a concentration gradient and causes bromide ions in the surrounding areas to diffuse towards it.

Doing so restores the reaction to the center of the nucleation point but decreases the bromide concentration in the surrounding areas. allows the competitive reaction to take over and oxidize pheroin to its blue form, this forms a blue ring of solution that has a reduced bromide concentration and again bromide from the surrounding areas diffuses into it, causing the wave move slowly and spread until it hits the walls of the board, the cycle can be repeated many times and many waves come out of the same nucleation point anyway, this was only my second attempt at doing this and I was very happy with the result, I decided try it.

I put it back into a larger dish and increased everything by a factor of 3. So for this one I used 18 ml of a 3 of b 1.5 of c and three of pharah. I also premixed it in a beaker so I could control how much I added to the dish and somehow on my first try I poured the perfect amount. At first it seemed to be working fine, but a lot of bubbles started appearing which interfered with the images at first. Honestly it's not that bad but as the reaction progresses it gets worse and worse, the reason they form is because of the reactions I mentioned above that reset the cycle when the blue ferroin is reduced to its red form by the malonic and bromomelonic acid, produces carbon dioxide and carbon. monoxide as by-products, this didn't really seem to be a problem with the previous run so I thought maybe it was just a problem with larger scales.

However, I tried it again with a smaller dish and it not only produced a lot of bubbles. His spots didn't grow very well either. Where the spots grow and spread from seems to be somewhat random, meaning each run will look different, so I guess I was lucky that the first one not only didn't bubble,It was also visually very pleasing. I ended up trying this a few more times on both a small and larger scale and could never get it bubble-free. I really wanted a nice, clean, large-scale version, so I tried to think of something. For this test I tried it with a little less malonic acid and a little less sodium bromide to see if it made less bubbles, however it didn't seem like there was much difference.

Actually, I didn't think I would. I've done almost anything, but just for the sake of trying to use less bromate, what I did was instead of measuring 18 mils of solution, I measured 12 and then diluted it to 18. So the bromate ions are about 30 percent. a hundred less than them. before it still worked but there were some artifacts and it was not able to produce the blue wave fronts in any case from a chemical perspective, I think the only way to reduce the bubbles is to completely replace the malonic acid. and to use something else instead of ferroin with a quick google search I found an article that talked about some bubble-free variations.

However, this is a pretty big topic and I think it's something I should maybe cover in a future video, so for now. I tried to find another solution, I didn't mention it yet, but this reaction can do multiple cycles if shaken or mixed at any time, you can leave it there again and it will start again, so my idea was to let the first cycle go all the way to the final and then I shake it to manually dislodge the bubbles. This was my first try and it seemed to work. On the third run there were no bubbles, but the cycle was also much faster and looked really different.

I think this is just because at this point the amount of malonic acid that is present is much less, this means that it cannot convert the pheroin to its red color as quickly, so the blue color slowly takes over with this result, I immediately started trying it. On a much larger scale, I mixed 90 ml of 15 b 7 and a half c and 15 mils pheroin and poured it all into a large kitchen dish, spread it out as best I could and also leveled the dish. Using a bit of paper the first cycle wasn't very good and I think it's because it was too deep with each subsequent cycle, although the colors seem to improve in the end, although the result was more or less the same as on the smaller scale. and by the third cycle there were no bubbles, I had the same problem, although there were no waves and it was just these solid blue dots growing.

I still thought it looked cool, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted. I finished I tried several different things and I think this was the test that worked best. The first major change was that instead of using 15 mils of Fairwin I used nine. I also found that I could add less liquid than needed and just let it sit. for the first cycle I'm not quite sure why but then when I mixed it to reset everything it would spread correctly, although the first cycle is completely lost when doing this it's still quite useful. I found that one of the biggest problems when scaling was simply getting the liquid to spread evenly across the plate and this really helped things.

The third run still had some bubbles, but it was relatively clean and the colors were nice and vibrant, although it did have random flashes of blue in the background, which was nice. The strange thing is that the first flash of blue also seemed to change the appearance of the waves and make them a little more sloppy. Overall, the waves on this third loop were much thicker than the previous races and at first I thought this was a drawback, however, upon review. After looking at a lot of images I realized that it was actually a good thing because as the scale gets bigger it becomes harder and harder to see the thin waves, so in order to make the large scales work and not look like a mess, the waves should be thickened anyway that being said, that brings us to the end of the project, as I mentioned before, in the future I might try to explore some of the other variations of this reaction, there are some without bubbles that might be interesting and there is also the original. recipe that also uses cerium ions.

In the last video I did a giveaway and these were the winners. I already sent everything for Jack and David, but unfortunately Audrey never contacted me, so I made another drawing and replaced her and the new one. The winner is Joshua from Belmore, New York, anyway, with that being said, here's a cool clip I just posted on my Instagram, if you haven't already you should definitely follow me there because I often post things that never make it to this channel. As always, thank you very much to all my followers on Patreon. Everyone who supports me can watch my videos at least 24 hours before posting them on YouTube.

Also, everyone on Patreon can message me directly and support me with five dollars or more. You will receive your name at the end as you see here.