DIY Dry Ice at Home from Scratch
Creating matter from nothing is a breakthrough, while making your own dry ice from scratch at home probably isn’t the best idea. Why? In addition to needing carbon dioxide, baking soda as well as hydrochloric acid are also required, and you haven’t even begun mixing things.



After capturing the carbon dioxide, Hyperspace Pirate utilized a fridge compressor to force the captured gas into a compressed air tank at 12 bar (~160 psi), which was then transferred to a 10 gallon (38L) tank. Freezing the carbon dioxide required it to be liquified by either high pressure, very low temperatures, or both. Now liquifying at room temperature around 25°C needs about 60 bar of pressure (~867 psi), but his compressor was only capable of producing about 28 bar (~400 psi). So, the tank had to be placed in an ice bath at 0°C.

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Once I had the liquid CO2, i turned my high pressure tank upside down so that the liquid would come out first, and discharged it. Liquid CO2 can’t exist at 1 atmosphere of pressure, so as soon as it comes out of the tank, it flash freezes to dry ice at -79°C. The tricky part is capturing the frozen CO2, since most of it blasts out into the atmosphere,” said Hyperspace Pirate.

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