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Thread: making your own fog juice?

  1. #21
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    you should add fuming nitric acid and a few drops of sulfuric to your glycerin and heat rapidly. to make purple fog add potassium permanganate.(these are jokes)

    Actual the first makes nitroglyerine and the second starts a fire.

    Acrolein is very nasty stuff. It is a mutagen. It stinks very bad and you'll know when you have made it. I measured the tip of my fog machine and it runs around 60C. This is a viper fog machine. The internal chamber I assume is much hotter.

    Last, and most important, ALL glycols can break down to acrolein and other related nasty compounds so I Doubt very much fog machines run hot enough normally to be a problem. I however will run an IR on the output and see if any is generated. You see I am a senior director of EHS for a major University and also a polymer chemist and toxicologist.

    I will also try glycerin in my fog unit and measure the output products. I will also see if I can pull the temperature higher to the point it makes a problem. If I find a problem I'll post here.

    EDIT: Thinking about it the following OBVIOUS point comes to mind. At what temperature does water boil..... Given the dwell time in the chamber and the fact that boiling water at atmospheric pressure holds a constant 100C AND the fact that acrolein polymerizes in the presence of water and oxygen, you wound find any free acrolein. It will be as various length polymers. Safe? Can't say but acrolein is not going to be found.

    I will trap the particles on a filter and see what I get. Stay tuned. Might not be an issue at all if they are large enough you can't breath them in or they will fall out of the air quickly.
    Last edited by kecked; 06-01-2014 at 16:56.

  2. #22
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    http://tsp.plasa.org/tsp/documents/docs/E1-5_2009.pdf

    Kind of generic but has some good info.

    I will start using draager tubes to detect acrolein, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, and a couple of others. Second I will use a PVC filter like those used to measure asbestos and a high volume pump. I will pull the fog through the filter at the source and from the room a few feet away. This filter will then be washed with a non polar solvent to preserve the elements on the filter and run through an NMR to determine the range of polymers found.

  3. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by zorn View Post
    What temperature would that be? Im not asking a single number, nor an exact minimum and maximum. But please give me something.
    I don't have specs for the heating element of a fog machine at my fingertips. But consider this: the element is hot enough to flash water to steam almost instantly when it's pumped through the element, and it's capable of maintaining that boiling action for quite a while. That means it has to be a lot hotter than 100 degrees C.

    By comparison, E-cigs are not hot enough to boil water.

    I'll defer to the research chemist (Kecked) above for the specifics, but the fact remains that you are dealing with an unknown quantity with potential health risks. And you seem to be putting an awful lot of effort into this just to save a few dollars.

    As I said before, if you order some Froggy's Swamp Juice, you won't need to worry about any health risks, nor will you have to worry about clogging your fog machine, and you will get GREAT fog that hangs in the air for a long time.

    Bottom line: The fact that so many experienced people here are trying to convince you NOT to make your own fluid should tell you something. If it really was worth doing, we'd all be doing it already.

    Adam

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    the reason a fog machine shuts down many times is the vaporization of the water cools the element to 100C. Water turns to steam at a constant temp depending on pressure.

    I agree with Adam just buy it but I'll run the tests just to document what I find. We may not want to know the answer.....

    heat of vaporization


    noun Physics.
    the heat absorbed per unit mass of a given material at its boiling point that completely converts the material to a gas at the same temperature: equal to the heat of condensation.

  5. #25
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    Ok finished tests at lunch. Using glycerine in a viper fog machine 30% 70% water it made a fog that was kind of boring and more like a smoke. It smelled bad as well. There was no formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, or acrolein measured. I have been collecting the polymers if they exist for about 3 hours. I will do the extraction and nmr after work today. So far nothing is seen but the fog sucks and stinks. A preliminary filter showed nothing but excess glycerin on the filter.

    One last point. Running this for just 30 minutes in a chamber I ended up with not just water condensation by a sticky goo on the walls of the chamber I suspect is composed of glycerin.

    Tomorrow I will run with my favorite rosco fog and do the same testing.

    Edit: just checked filter. It is full of glycerin. It must have cooked it because it is yellow and not clear. That means I should see some polymer and acrolein/adlehydes. It's in the NMR now. I'll read it in the morning. That could also be rust from my chamber.

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    Quote Originally Posted by zorn View Post
    buffo, sorry but i dont wish to waste thread space and my free time discussing your wrong assumptions about what i want to do among other things i disagree in your post.
    If you have the free time to investigate manufacturing your own fog juice, then you have the free time to discuss the possible pit falls involved.

  7. #27
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    On a low cost 400 Watt Fogger,

    With the lid off and the Fogger idling. :

    I measured 160' C at the COLDEST part of the chamber. I measured 210-220' C at the wall where the cold part of the heater element passes through the chamber wall. The heater element was well over 400'C, past the upper limit of my instrument. Typically finned, air cooled, stainless steel, heaters run around 700'C in air. The fog stream was ~ 160'C with a tiny thermocouple in the exit stream. The chamber wall does not contribute much heat, the internal spiral heater does most of the work. The cover wall of the fogger was at 65'C when the lid was on. The fluid in use was dilute, mostly water. A more organic fluid would be hotter.

    As the chamber is above the boiling point of the fluid, and constrains pressure inside, the outlet fluid temperature will be above the boiling point of the liquid involved, until the chamber wall cools below the BP.


    The ceramic Klixon Switch (Thermostat) was a 150'C part. It has 5 cM of thin Aluminum between the point where the cold part of the heater element leads pass through the wall, and the Klixon location. So the heater element is quite hot. The Klixon is being driven more by radiative heating then by conduction.

    When not creating output it emits a strong burning smell as the heater cracks the residual fluid. Greater then 400'C temperature means at least the initial fluid contacting the heater decomposes, period. Paper ignites at ~430' C under ideal conditions. (edit, just checked that)

    Enough Said.

    And Zorn, I note you or someone else have asked this question on two chemistry forums within the past two days. Google sees nearly all.


    Steve
    Last edited by mixedgas; 06-02-2014 at 16:43.
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  8. #28
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    Fascinating stuff, I wasn't aware of that aspect of glycol chemistry. I'm not entirely sure that Ecigs are likely to be that much different. They work on exactly the same principle and use a pure PG / glycerol mix. Some of the boutique vapourisers are putting 10W through a tiny little wick, and I suspect must therefore reach fairly impressive temperatures before the products are inhaled directly.

  9. #29
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    Quote Originally Posted by innazone View Post
    Some of the boutique vapourisers are putting 10W through a tiny little wick, and I suspect must therefore reach fairly impressive temperatures before the products are inhaled directly.
    So you think that E-cigs are designed to produce live steam that is then inhaled? Um... I'm pretty sure they'd be off the market by now if that were the case!

    E-cigs are nowhere near as hot as a fog machine. It's been discussed above. For one, the heaters in a fog machine are 1 to 2 orders of magnitude larger than the ones used in an E-cig. (Your standard "El-cheap-o fogger" that you find at Walmart for $40 uses a 400 watt heater, while most larger units use 1200-1500 watt heaters, and commercial units are 2KW and up.) Secondly, if an E-cig did run as hot as a fogger, the output would cause instant 3rd degree burns to the user's lips and mouth. (Ever get burned by having a body part too close to the output end of an F100? I have, and it hurts like hell.)

    As for Zorn's comments, I think Stiffler said it best: If you have enough time to discuss the manufacturing of your own fog fluid, you have enough time to discuss the reasons why it's not a good idea.

    The part that I find most amusing is that he asks for advice from the "many knowledgeable people on the forum" (his words), and then proceeds to argue with and ignore them. Sigh. If you don't want to listen to the answer, don't ask the question...

    Adam

  10. #30
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    Quote Originally Posted by zorn View Post
    Talking with someone who has his head up his ass.
    Pot.Kettle.Black!

    If you don't plan to do it, why are you continuing to argue about it's viability? Don't try to play that "I might not try it" crap. You know damned well you do. Several people have tried to convince you otherwise and you keep asking the same question in different ways, evidently in the hope that sooner or later you will get the answer you were looking for.

    im not saying im going to do it, im just interested in how bad it is
    Bullshit.

    im interested in a real study and results. B
    So the fact that a research chemist has told you it's a bad idea isn't enough for you? Now you expect someone else to actually perform the experiment, measure the results, and then give you specific concentrations of the harmful effects? That's beyond stupid, it's arrogant as hell. If you want to see the results of a study, do it yourself, but don't expect others to do your dirty work for you.

    0ut if the results show there isnt harm, i might consider it
    Right. As if you weren't already considering it. At this point I'm inclined to tell you to just go ahead and do it and breathe the fumes yourself. And if you get cancer in 20 years, well, tough luck for you!

    not everyone lives in America.
    Living in America has nothing to do with it. Had you asked for solutions to your specific shipping problems, you could have gotten several. Among them, having the fluid shipped to a neighboring country and then delivered by bus to your location. Much cheaper than air-freight shipping. Customs issues can also be worked around, especially if the item is sent as a gift from a fellow laserist in a neighboring country.

    But rather than even entertain any of these solutions, or others that I haven't even thought about, you immediately fixated on the "make your own" route, and haven't bothered to think about anything else since. So yeah, you'll forgive me if I don't believe that you're really here just for the science.

    if i could, i would buy froggys,
    And if you had bothered to ask for assistance, I'm sure several people here (including me) would have been willing to investigate all sorts of options to help you. But since you'd rather be an asshole about it, I'm personally not in the mood to give you the time of day anymore.

    Good luck in your quest. Or not. Frankly, I don't give a damned anymore.

    Adam

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