page_title: Dry ice
section_title: Commercial
hierarchical_section_title: Dry ice / Applications / Commercial
caption_attribution_description: English: Dry ice in a pot of water, in the grass.
context_page_description: Dry ice is the solid form of carbon dioxide. It is used primarily as a cooling agent. Its advantages include lower temperature than that of water ice and not leaving any residue. It is useful for preserving frozen foods where mechanical cooling is unavailable.
  Dry ice sublimates at 194.65 K at Earth atmospheric pressures. This extreme cold makes the solid dangerous to handle without protection due to burns caused by freezing. While generally not very toxic, the outgassing from it can cause hypercapnia due to buildup in confined locations.
context_section_description: The most common use of dry ice is to preserve food, using non-cyclic refrigeration.
  It is frequently used to package items that must remain cold or frozen, such as ice cream or biological samples, without the use of mechanical cooling.
  Dry ice can be used to flash-freeze food or laboratory biological samples, carbonate beverages,  make ice cream, solidify oil spills and stop ice sculptures and ice walls from melting.
  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 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 theatres, haunted house attractions, and nightclubs for dramatic effects. Unlike most artificial fog machines, in which fog rises like smoke, fog from dry ice hovers near the ground. Dry ice is useful in theatre productions that require dense fog effects. The fog originates from the bulk water into which the dry ice is placed, and not from atmospheric water vapor (as is commonly assumed).
  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. Dry ice has 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 inches (100 mm) in diameter.
  Dry ice can be used as bait to trap mosquitoes, bedbugs, and other insects, due to their attraction to carbon dioxide.
  It can be used to exterminate rodents. This is done by dropping pellets into rodent tunnels in the ground and then sealing off the entrance, thus suffocating the animals as the dry ice sublimates.
  Tiny dry ice pellets can be used to fight fire by both cooling fuel and suffocating the fire by excluding oxygen.
  The extreme temperature of dry ice can cause viscoelastic materials to change to glass phase. Thus, it is useful for removing many types of pressure sensitive adhesives.
caption: Dry ice in water
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