the eternally unfolding mystery of water

next up: ice, steam

Is it? Even if you're unfamiliar w/ the phenomenon?

It doesn't have to react to sugar, it just needs a spoon or something to break the surface tension and it'll start to boil.

this has happened to me once or twice when adding sugar to microwaved coffee. scary shit

I ran across superheated water by accident on snopes. I had never heard of it before. Like every human alive except Chocolate Jesus, I was curious to know more.

I used to work for a company that designed steam heating systems for factories like paper mills & such.

A vital component was a device called the "desuperheater" that prevented this from happening on a large scale. If it didn't function properly, sudden release of the gasses the water had absorbed would result in explosions powerful enough to destroy sections of the factory and kill people.

We had to test all our desuperheaters. The only way to do that was to take them out to a big open field behind the fabrication facility and hook it up to a massive boiler. and miniature steam system. Then, the engineers would heat the water as fast as they could while reading the gauges inside "the duck blind", a three-sided reinforced metal hut located at the edge of the field.

If the desuperheater didn't work, there were parts of the mini steam system designed to be weak so the explosion was controlled.

In the time I worked there, we never had a desuperheater fail, but there had apparently been a lot of trial and error when the company was first starting out.

HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT WATER