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In this video I'm going to turn seashells into dry ice. Sea shells are

mostly made up of limestone or Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3), which can be
decomposed into Calcium Oxide (CaO) and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) when heated
to around 900C. I used a 500W induction heater i built to heat a sealed
pipe full of sea shells to a hot enough temperature and collected the
CO2 gas into a beach ball by using a vacuum pump to extract it from the
pipe.

For limestone decomposition to occur at a reasonably fast rate, the

temperature really needs to be over ~1000C, so this process took several
hours (even for only ~50 grams of limestone) and required a vacuum pump
to pull off the CO2. I broke down the remainder of my sea shells by
dissolving them in vinnegar, and saved the Calcium Acetate biproduct for
later use as a solid fuel for camping/hiking.

Once I collected a decent volume of CO2, I used a refrigeration

compressor to pump it into a platestack heat exchanger and used a
propanebased vapor compression refrigeration system to chill the high
pressure CO2 down to about 30C, so it required only modest pressure to
liquify. The refrigeration system is actually the precooler stage for
my joulethomson cryocooler, which i borrowed for this video.

Once a decent mass of CO2 has been pumped into the heat exchanger and

liquified, it's discharged through a ~1mm diameter capillary tube into a
thermos with a glass wool baffle to stop high speed gases from carrying
away tiny particles of the ice.

With a little bit of improvement to the limestone furnace temperature,

and some minor tweaks to my refrigeration system, this could be an
extremely cheap way to make dry ice, assuming a limestone source is
available. With the right setup, costs could be as low as a few cents
per pound of ice.

Induction Heater Schematic:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WWGM...

Music Used:
Kevin MacLeod George Street Shuffle
Kevin MacLeod Groove Groove
Kevin MacLeod Lobby Time