I know what you mean about the complications all getting out of hand when you are a non-chemist and just want to know some practical stuff but also want to delve deeply and understand (actually I -do- have a chemistry degree, among others, but I'm not a chemist and it mostly seems useless a lot of the time,
) I consider part of my entertainment within the hobby to be these little learning episodes in areas that are foreign to me, so I'm getting myself into them all the time.
OK, so to repeat, I've seen references off and on over the last 3 years about there being some CO2 in the liquid state, but most of it being in the gaseous state within the pressurized bottle and I've seen still more refs to this in my reading the last couple days.
One of the most interesting angles to come at it with I think is this one (sorry to keep repeating wikipedia ones (A lot of the pages I've been looking at are commercial bottled gas places and stuff but..)).. it's the "Bottled Gas" page on wikipedia. What's interesting is that it shows that CO2 can bottled in both Case 2 and Case 4 scenerios (as you'll see by reading their chart) and it makes sense to me that CO2 simply happens to cross the boundary where if you want/need to store a lot more of it and can spend more (these would probably be commercial type situations) you can use a Dewer Flask type of solution (vacuum space between double shells) and combine both greater cold and pressure to store more CO2 (this is a Case 4 solution) whereas the things we planted tank enthusiasts do is always a Case 2 solution where ultimately much less gas is stored and it is in our tank and straddles the boundary line such that there is a smaller percentage of it in the liquid state in the bottom of the cylinder but most of the space above is in the gas state. When gas is allowed to exit the cylinder by the regulator, more of the CO2 that's in the liquid state moves over to the gaseous state. When the cylinder is first filled there is more in the liquid state (still something less than half) but towards the end of it's use there will be no more liquid but still a lot of gas under pressure. One of the limitations for paintballers is that when they shoot a lot, a lot of gas will go out with each short burst and then since the pressure is lowered, more gas boils off the liquid, causing the whole cylinder to go cold and if they do that enough they have less umph because of the temporary cold I believe. (It's funny how you end up reading web pages from aquascaping, paintballing, beer making, welding, construction and science, lol.)
Again, if you look at that CO2 state chart on the wiki CO2 page, you can see that our typical household temperatures (between freezing and 100F for instance) are right there in the liquid CO2 range (the temps are Kelvin but you can convert) and I believe the pressures (in Bars) are well within the ranges of pressures we can do within the strong cylinders (although I admit I get dizzy when I do enough of these conversions between atms, bars, pAs, psis and all while trying to jump back and forth between different refs that tell what pressures people have in their gas bottles, lol.)
~~waterdrop~~
