Eli5 what would happen if you had water in a completely sealed container and brought it past boiling temp

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Would it just turn into a pressurized container full of steam? Would the water stay water but just like, really hot?

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29 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You’d make an explosion at the point that the container couldn’t hold back the expansion of steam.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Pressure would build from the gas expansion until either the container becomes unsealed or the pressure itself begins to suppress the evaporation process

Anonymous 0 Comments

That is exactly what a pressure canner/instant pot does. The contents reach a temperature higher than boiling, high enough to cook faster and or/sterilize the food.

Fun fact: you can use an instant pot as an autoclave.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Depends on container size and how much water is in it. If you’ve ever seen one of those water phase diagrams you can get a good notion of how its state varies, not just with temperature but also with pressure. In theory it’s possible to have liquid water at any temperature, so long as the pressure inside the container is high enough.

Anonymous 0 Comments

PV=nRT. If you hold the Volume V constant and increased the temperature T, the Pressure P would also increase. The vessel would eventually fail and you could have an explosion.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Well, Mythbusters did something to show this:

[https://youtu.be/rGWmONHipVo](https://youtu.be/rGWmONHipVo)

Probably my favorite experiment of all time from them.

As the water gets hotter, it will be more difficult to contain the steam. Unless you have a completely unbreakable container…well boom!

Anonymous 0 Comments

At higher pressures liquids have to get hotter before they turn into a gas. Assuming the container doesn’t explode, the pressure would build as it heats up. This pressure makes it harder for more water to boil off, which allows the water to actually go above 100C. This continues until you can’t put in more heat, or all the water becomes high pressure steam.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Two things would happen. First, just like you said, it would continue to be water but really hot since the boiling point of water rises with pressure. You get this interesting cycle of water boiling, turning to steam, increasing the pressure, the increased pressure stops the boiling until it gets hot enough to boil again at that pressure. This cycle repeats until the pressure overcomes the ability of the vessel to hold said pressure. Then you get a steam explosion where the vessel explodes and rapidly reduces the pressure but not the temperature causing the water to turn to steam very quickly and violently. For reference, water boils at 100c at 14.7psi (atmospheric pressure) but at 225psi water don’t boil until 200c.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There would be some steam but mostly, it would stay as water.

The boiling point of water increases as pressure increases. So after a little water becomes steam which increases the pressure, the rest will remain as liquid.

If you continue heating the water past its *new* boiling point the water will turn into steam and the pressure will get higher and higher. Any real-world container will blow up.

Because the water is above its normal-pressure boiling temperature, as soon as the container breaks it’s going to very rapidly turn into steam and basically explode. This is called a BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion) and is extremely dangerous.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The pressure would raise the boiling point of the water. As the temperature continues to rise you’d have more water boil but this would in turn raise the pressure. At each temperature you’d find an equilibrium between steam and water. This will continue until you’re left with an container full of steam, a container full of plasma, or a container that exploded.