Thread: RODI water to make lather

Originally Posted by thebigspendur

Really?

I have RO water and heat it in the microwave pretty much daily and have never had that happen. You must have some heavy duty industrial super microwave.

It rarely happens and requires specific conditions for it to occur. It's called superheating and it happens when water bubbles fail to form due to lack of nucleation sites. Dissolved solids and/or any slight scratches or impurities on the surface of the container usually provide the nucleation sites.

Originally Posted by Utopian

It rarely happens and requires specific conditions for it to occur. It's called superheating and it happens when water bubbles fail to form due to lack of nucleation sites. Dissolved solids and/or any slight scratches or impurities on the surface of the container usually provide the nucleation sites.

Glad someone pointed this out as I was thinking "someone is going to boil their face doing this" while reading this.

I remember in chem lab in college our professor did this with the purified water we used for experiments. Filled up a jar, set in on the hot plate behind a glass shield for a while, dropped in a glass bead, BOOM. Looked cool but made the point quickly.