Science desk
< February 3	<< Jan \| February \| Mar >>	February 5 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

February 4

What organic compound can survive the highest temperature without autoignition or decomposition?

What about heating in a vacuum or inert gas? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 07:01, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Combustion cannot take place without oxygen, so autoignition can be ignored. It seems that the saturated hydrocarbons resist thermal decomposition the best, but: "Even very dense hydrocarbons decompose at 1200° C."^[1] There are several articles on the thermal decomposition of n-alkanes,^[2][3] of none of which I could access the text. --Lambiam 10:40, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

In vacuum or inert gas it can't (unless it can burn itself like nitroglycerin), if you heat it the easiest way of course it might become inorganic by burning with the O2 in the air instead. So without oxygen seems to be saturated hydrocarbons then, they can survive more heat than I thought! Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 15:37, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The paper High Temperature Organic ΉElectronics identifies phenyl-substituted DNTT (dinaphtho[2,3-b:2,3-f]thieno[3,2‐b]thiophene) as stable after sterilization above 200°C and cites demonstration by Gumyusenge et. al. of organic transistor structures that are functional up to 250°C. Philvoids (talk) 10:53, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if this could ever help with CPU cooling: simply let it reach 240°C. No one ever seems to invent something better than silicon despite progress becoming ever harder with it and many candidates for replacement. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 15:37, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Silicon has the advantage because it has the correct electrical properties for use in semiconductors. It isn't really a question of "inventing something better". There are a limited number of chemical elements to do the job with, and there isn't necessarily anything as yet better suited to the task and also meeting all of the constraints in terms of cost and availability and the like. --Jayron 32 16:45, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I saw a 1980s book that said technology so and so will probably make CPU transistors switch every few picoseconds or less by the 1990s, years ago I saw a slide from Intel I think that said there's a bunch of after silicon candidates, some semiconductor with two elements was supposed to be in the lead, some nanometer (3? 5? 7? I forgot) was supposed to be this, blah blah blah. Replacement of silicon with something with potential for orders of magnitude better seems to stay forever in the future, like trying to drive to the end of the rainbow. By invent I didn't meaning making a semiconducting compound no one's ever thought of before but learning how to work out all the kinks to make chips from it that'd outcompete silicon. That clearly hasn't happened yet and seems to be a near insurmountable engineering problem. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:04, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If you're interested in high temperature computing, look into the work towards new long-term Venus surface probes, using silicon carbine and the like. Fgf10 (talk) 18:04, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think you mean silicon carbide; it's not exactly a new invention; it was actually one of the first semiconductors used by the electronics industry. I don't think their using sawed off machine guns in computers. --Jayron 32 18:10, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]