Imagine one fine morning, you wake up, have breakfast and plan to have a refreshing vape to start the day. But then you discover that your beloved tank has cracked like a piece of bark. What happened? Surely it wasn’t because you dropped it, you cherish it very much. Could it be because of the juice you added to the tank last night? Well, it’s entirely possible and today let’s talk about a rather painful issue in the vape community: “tank-cracker juice”, which roughly translates to juice that will destroy the beauty of your tank.
Over time, vapers have realized that some juices, or more accurately, some flavors, react “negatively” with plastic tank glass, resulting in cracks, chips, or worse, melting and deforming the tank glass.
A cracked plastic tank glass
The tank of a vape atomizer can be made from many different materials, from glass, heat-treated glass (pyrex) to completely 304L stainless steel. However, those materials require good machining and are quite expensive, so manufacturers have thought of making the "glass" for the tank from plastic, specifically Polycarbonate and PMMA. These are two types of plastic that simulate glass but are easier to process and, importantly, they are very impact-resistant. In return, they lose the chemical resistance of glass, which means that some substances in the juice may react with the surface of the combustion chamber and cause quite... painful traces.
Tank glasses come in many different materials.
Citric acid, also known as lemon acid, is found in many citrus-flavored e-juices, such as lemon, grapefruit, orange, etc. It is also found in cola-flavored juices and especially cinnamon-flavored juices. To be exact, this acid is present in most flavors, but it is more abundant in citrus-flavored juices. You have learned basic chemistry, higher concentrations of acid are stronger, right? This natural acid will bind to plastic molecules to create esters, causing wear and tear and loss of integrity of the material. Usually, when this process occurs, your tank glass will appear cracked or foggy, in more severe cases the tank will crack and can no longer be used.
Hearing words like citric acid, polycarbonate sounds scary and complicated, right? Don't leave the article yet because I don't want to scare you. Just understand it simply. Substance A reacts with substance B, creating substance C and that's not good, that's all.
Citric Acid is abundant in citrus essential oils such as lemon, grapefruit, orange...
Citric acid is the most common natural acid in everyday life, a glass of fresh lemon juice has a concentration of citric acid hundreds of times higher than in your juice. Unfortunately, instead of bringing the refreshing feeling of drinking a glass of cool lemon juice, it will ruin your vape fun.
While these juices can crack plastic tank glass, it’s rare for anything serious to happen. You can still use the glass, it’ll just look bad. If you’re a citrus vaper, you can switch to a pyrex tank. They’re more expensive, but they’re guaranteed to never crack (they’ll still break if dropped). There are also ultem, delrin, and peek, but I’ll talk about those in another post.
Hope you vapers find this information interesting. Have a great evening, vape on!
Gia Bao
