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Applications of dry ice:
The most common use of dry ice is to preserve food,using non-cyclic refrigeration.
It is frequently used to package items that need to remain cold or frozen, such as ice cream or biological samples, without the use of mechanical cooling.
Moreover, dry ice can be used to flash freeze food, laboratory biological samples, carbonate beverages, and make ice cream.
Dry ice can be used to arrest and prevent insect activity in closed containers of grains and grain products, as it displaces oxygen, but does not alter the taste or quality of such foods. For the same reason, it can prevent or retard food oils and fats from becoming rancid.
When dry ice is placed in water sublimation is accelerated, and low-sinking, dense clouds of smoke-like fog are created. This is used in fog machines, at theaters, discothèques, haunted house attractions, and nightclubs for dramatic effects. Unlike most artificial fog machines, in which fog rises like smoke, fog from dry ice hovers above the ground.Dry ice is useful in theater productions that require dense fog effects.
It is occasionally used to freeze and remove warts. However, liquid nitrogen performs better in this role, since it is colder so requires less time to act and less pressure. However, dry ice has the advantage of having fewer problems with storage, since it can be generated from compressed carbon dioxide gas as needed.
Plumbers use equipment that forces pressurised liquid CO2 into a jacket around a pipe; the dry ice formed causes the water to freeze, forming an ice plug, allowing them to perform repairs without turning off the water mains. This technique can be used on pipes up to 4 in (100 mm) in diameter.
Dry ice can be used as bait to trap mosquitoes and other insects, due to their attraction to carbon dioxide.
An alternative method to cooling computer parts is with the use of dry ice. This purpose is overshadowed by more conventional ways with fans, heat transfer fluids, liquid nitrogen, or phase change cooling.
Industrial
Dry ice can be used to loosen asphalt floor tiles or car sound deadening making it easy to pry off, as well as freezing water in valveless pipes to enable repair.One of the largest mechanical uses of dry ice is blast cleaning. Dry ice pellets are shot out of a nozzle with compressed air. This can remove residues from industrial equipment. Examples of materials being removed include ink, glue, oil, paint, mold and rubber. Dry ice blasting can replace sandblasting, steam blasting, water blasting or solvent blasting. The primary environmental residue of dry ice blasting is the sublimed CO2, thus making it a useful technique where residues from other blasting techniques are undesirable.
Dry ice is also useful for the de-gassing of flammable vapours from storage tanks — the sublimation of dry ice pellets inside an emptied and vented tank causes an outrush of CO2 that carries with it the flammable vapours.
Scientific
In laboratories, a slurry of dry ice in an organic solvent is a useful freezing mixture for cold chemical reactions and for condensing solvents in rotary evaporators.
The process of altering cloud precipitation can be done with the use of dry ice.It was widely used in experiments in the United States in the 1950s and early 60s before being replaced by silver iodide. Nevertheless, dry ice has the advantage of being relatively cheap and completely non-toxic.Yet its main drawback is that it has to be delivered directly into the supercooled region of any clouds being seeded.
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