[bootlegengineer]

Hi! So yesterday I was on a mission to collect some ammonium nitrate by boiling down ice packs. So I found 1 Freeze Pak and 1 Blue Ice, broke them open, and combined them. Afterwards, I boiled the mixture down until there was no water left. When I finished, I was left with this gelatinous substance, which kind of surprised me. After doing a couple hours of research, I concluded that the Freez Pak was made of an ice substitute and the Blue Ice was made out of propylene glycol. I knew what the propylene glycol was, but not the ice substitute. After even more research, I concluded that the substitute was made of polypropylene glycol. However, I just want to confirm a few things before I go any further with this stuff.

1) Am I correct on what the substances in each of these ice packs are made of?

2) Are the propylene glycol and polypropylene glycol supposed to reach with each other, because they seed to combine.

3) What can I do with this substance in terms of chemistry? I want to know if it's worth keeping this stuff around and stored for future use.

Thanks a bunch for the help and I look forward to hearing back!

[Arkcon]

Yes, the gel found in those packs you freeze in the freezer is often proplyene glycol.  Its a food safe gelatinous, high molecular weight polymer you can look up the properties of on Google or Wikipedia.

Don't know why you expected ammonium nitrate to be there.  The cold packs sold on the department store shelf, that react with a small interenal pouch of water to get very cold, are the ones that contain ammonium nitrate.

[Enthalpy]

Please do NOT heat ammonium nitrate unless you know very exactly what you're doing (... and if you knew you wouldn't do it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate_disasters
I'd like to remind you that anti-personnel mines contain 50g of explosive, and that ammonium nitrate also detonates without a fuel.