This is probably really dumb but I wanted to know how dry ice makes that smoke. Is it water vapor? Or something else and why does it burn our skin when we come into contact with it.
In: Chemistry
Dry ice is frozen CO2. Ar atmospheric pressure, CO2 cannot exist as liquid, so it turns into gas straight from the solid. And because it’s very cold, it instantly condenses moisture in air on contacr. So yes, the visible “smoke’ is just water vapor.
Dry ice is a really cold and solid form of carbon dioxide. Thus any vapor coming from it is carbon dioxide gas. It makes the gas because it’s heating up to a temperature where carbon dioxide is a gas; the process of turning from a solid to a gas is called sublimation. It burns the skin because it is too cold for our skin to handle similar to the ice cube and salt “trick”.
Carbon dioxide, at atmospheric pressure, doesn’t exist as a liquid state at any temperature. It sublimates directly from a really cold solid into a gas, absorbing energy from it’s surroundings as it does so.
Keep in mind that phase change occurs at roughly -78 Celsius, which is pretty cold. That’s why you don’t want to touch the stuff with bare hands.
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