Welcome to BBC Brit’s Biggest Bangs. This is a interactive experience where you get to mix dangerous chemicals with EXPLOSIVE results behind the safety of your screen.
Simply choose a chemical to start off with and then select a second chemical from the table to mix it with! Will it bang or won’t it? Let us know in the comments below.
You’ll need to have annotations enabled to get experimenting. For our budding chemists on mobile here are a few of our favourite reactions:
https://youtu.be/o0hKhQW9kIg
https://youtu.be/-6XnBzOWar8
https://youtu.be/Z4RZmNdjiJw
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The reactions were ranked using the following, Biggest Bangs formulated equation: ΔHro / tr * z.
ΔHro is the standard enthalpy change of reaction (so the heat change during the reaction), tr is the duration of the reaction and z is the catalysis coefficient.
The “catalysis coefficient” (z) is basically our way of quantifying what was needed to get the reaction going – low for something like touch or exposure to light, higher for times when direct heating with a Bunsen burner was required. We then applied this equation to the results of our experiments, generating a ranked list of reactions with the top spot claimed by…well, no spoiling the surprise here of course.
Each reaction also has an estimation of the amount of energy generated per mole – a mole being a chemistry standard used to define an amount of a substance.
A big thank you to Bryson Gore; Dr David Mills (University of Manchester); Prof Andrea Sella (UCL); and Tracey Howard (Institute of Education, UCL)
This is a channel from BBC Worldwide who help fund new BBC programmes.
