Why is it that when ice is put into a deep fryer it essentially erupts?
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Because a deep fryer is at a temperature that’s significantly higher than the boiling point of water and water is also more dense than oil. So when you throw the ice in it sinks, melts and the water boils rapidly displacing the oil above it causing the oil to overflow the fryer
Steam explosion. Ice is a fairly dense form of water and steam on the other hand is not very dense. When you put ice or even liquid water into hot oil, it basically instantly boils. The water rapidly expands into steam, and a rapid expansion of gas is just another name for explosion. Liquid water will also do this, which is why you should never put out an oil fire with water.
A kilogram of ice takes up a certain amount of space. A kilogram of water takes up approximately the same amount of space. A kilogram of steam, which ice will VERY quickly become in very hot oil, will be a volume of about 1600 times that of ice. So this rapid attempt at expansion is pretty violent and turbulent, causing the chaos that you would see.
When water goes from Liquid to Gaseous form, it expands by a ratio of about 1600 times.
So one drop of water becomes a gas cloud the size of 1600 drops of water when it evaporates.
And because an ice cube is large enough to be completely submerged and the oil is hot enough to instantly turn ice in to gas. The gas gets trapped inside the oil and causes an explosion instead.
when you toss ice into that oil, the ice instantly melts, and then boils. however the fun part is because the oil is less dense than water, the water sinks below the surface of the oil before it starts to boil, cause a pressurized explosion of steam out of the oil that sprays boiling water and hot oil everywhere. this same logic is why you never want to throw water on a grease fire unless you want to be splattered with burning grease.
– Water is denser than oil and sinks to the bottom.
– Fry oil is way hotter than water’s boiling temp.
– When water boils, its volume expands by more than 1700x
So the water sinks, very rapidly boils, and them immediately turns into a huge volume of steam, *underneath the oil*. Boom
A deepfryer is usually 350-375 F (175-200 C)
Water evaporates at 212 F (100 C)
So if you put water or ice into a deep fryer it is evaporating VERY fast. The process of going from a liquid to gas is a HUGE increase in volume of the molecules. 18mL of water or 18g of ice, will turn into 22 Litres of steam gas very fast. The fryer oil will get carried along and could potentially cause a fire ball if it ignites.
Steel mills have a thing they call a furnace reaction. This is in the winter win a piece of ice gets trapped in the scrap steel they put in the furnace. If the liquid steel touches it a steam explosion results. I have been on the melt shop floor when a bale of steel containing an entire car was blown 100 feet out of the furnace. At one Atmosphere 1 gallon of water produces 1800 gallons of steam.
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