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Description
Chemical hand-warmers are powered by the heat generated when supersaturated solutions crystallize. They are supposed to be reusable if you just boil them to let the crystals dissolve. For some reason however, after enough uses they stop dissolving so well.

My chemistry teacher who I TA for gave me a whole bunch of these hand warmers yesterday and asked me if I could try to salvage the contents, so I cut them all open and heated the sodium acetate + solvent in a beaker to see if I could get it to go back to being a supersaturated solution. While I wasn't able to get all of the sodium acetate to dissolve back into the solution, when I came back the next day, it had completely solidified in the beaker (oops) into some pretty cool crystals.

NOTE: Sodium acetate crystals are clear/white irl, but I couldn't help but try to pretty them up in Photoshop before posting. I thought it kind of looked like an alien landscape, so if you'd like to use it as a reference image, feel free to download the and set it to grey scale.

Description
Chemical hand-warmers are powered by the heat generated when supersaturated solutions crystallize. They are supposed to be reusable if you just boil them to let the crystals dissolve. For some reason however, after enough uses they stop dissolving so well.

My chemistry teacher who I TA for gave me a whole bunch of these hand warmers yesterday and asked me if I could try to salvage the contents, so I cut them all open and heated the sodium acetate + solvent in a beaker to see if I could get it to go back to being a supersaturated solution. While I wasn't able to get all of the sodium acetate to dissolve back into the solution, when I came back the next day, it had completely solidified in the beaker (oops) into some pretty cool crystals.

NOTE: Sodium acetate crystals are clear/white irl, but I couldn't help but try to pretty them up in Photoshop before posting. I thought it kind of looked like an alien landscape, so if you'd like to use it as a reference image, feel free to download the and set it to grey scale.