Advanced Tinkering - 2022-08-03
Here you can see the reaction between lithium and glass. In this exothermic reaction, the silicon dioxide is reduced to elemental silicon and lithium oxide is formed. Jetzt auch mit deutschem Untertitel! Now with german subtitles! If you want, you can join my patreon to help me working on my projects. I would really appreciate it! https://www.patreon.com/AdvancedTinkering
I've never been able to attack glass, even with hot, concentrated sodium hydroxide solution. The situation is different with molten sodium hydroxide, which attacks glass quite quickly. By the way: I did melt it to get sodium metal via electrolysis, which worked quite well for small amounts. The melting point of sodium hydroxide is 318°C, and yes it is very dangerous to handle such hot and corrosive stuff!
Concentrated sodium hydroxide solution will attack glass, but it's slow and poorly noticeable. It's one of the reasons why one should never clean volumetric glassware with it. Even a tiny change in thickness will result in the completely mismatched volume.
i have broken quite a few beakers and flasks from molten lithium, an example would be when i reacted fuming nitric acid with lithium where the lithium was hot enough to liquify and stuck to the beaker eating a hole through it, and cracking on cooling
Yes, I was always terrified that there could be some lithium in the flask when distilling the cesium.
Out of curiosity, why did you react lithium with fuming nitric acid?
Very interesting video! Didn't know that lithium would react with glass
Too much glassware? Reduce it with lithium!
Thank you for this video, it's good to be aware of this problem! I found this out the hard way when trying to distill lithium in a quartz tube vacuum oven. The borosillicate glass destillation setup was all cracked and black and the lithium that leaked out even damaged the quartz tube. Luckily I only used a small amount of lithium... By the way, do you have the link for that other lithium glass reaction video that you mentioned in your video?
Interesting, I was asking myself if it would also attack quartz glass. It can be very terrifying if you don't know about it.
Sure, this is the other video: https://youtu.be/cFGejaYqM-c
Oddly, the more reactive alkali metals don't seem to attack glass like lithium does. I've seen videos of people heating the more reactive alkali metals potassium and rubidium very strongly in glass ampoules even to the point where they start boiling and they still don't react with the glass.
This happened to me and I never knew it was a reaction till now
Lithium redox, pretty interesting. Thank you.
Awesome! Ever considered trying to deliberately diffuse Lithium one side of a piece of glass to make a gradient index optic?
Thank you! I honestly never thought about that. I will take a look into this topic!
@@AdvancedTinkering 😀Potassium may be more suitable (tried and tested in Dow Corning's Gorilla Glass)
Never knew how reactive lithium was towards glass. Produced silicon.
I had no idea, that's my one thing I like to learn a day. Lucky too, 3 mins to spare 😉
It looks like your enjoying the videos :D. I appreciate it!
Ok. That was cool.
I love these videos! I found your channel from That Chemist. Also, that looks like a Crack pipe in the last 10 seconds of the video haha
Very interesting!
Just FYI, your English subtitles are in German
Thank you! Mh... I thought I changed it to "German". Thank you for pointing that out. I will take a look at it.
2Li+Si02=Si+2Li2O, silicon is recovering from its oxide, which is basic component of glass...
Correct! :)
Thanks for this. Based on your explanation, I am guessing it doesn't matter whether the glassware is quartz or not? Did you find that the reaction only occurs when the lithium metal begins to melt?
Im honestly not sure. I never tried it with quartz glass. As soon as I get my hands on some, I will try it.
I have never witnessed a reaction at room temperature.
@@AdvancedTinkering Thanks for the reply. There is an article by D.W. Jeppson and coworkers (1978) saying that molten lithium can be held in quartz containers up to 285 degC. So I guess there would be a difference between a normal glass and a quartz - interesting to see what you get. It may be that molten lithium is just incompatible with all glassware, or certain types of glassware can tolerate molten lithium but not at elevated temperatures.
Just another (exotic) thermite reaction.... :D
I didn't understand the carbon example, were you saying that carbon is also dangerous to heat in glassware since it can also reduce the glass?
No, you can heat carbon in glassware. The reduction of silicon dioxide with carbon is performed at 2000 °C. The glass will be molten at this temperature anyway.
I found this reaction out the hard way lol
Maybe it would be interesting to see if a quartz test tube reacts the same, faster, or slower than a borosilicate glass. Quartz might not crack as quickly.
From Wikipedia ...
"The composition of low-expansion borosilicate glass, such as those laboratory glasses ...is approximately 80% silica, 13% boric oxide, 4% sodium oxide or potassium oxide and 2–3% aluminium oxide."
I will try it with quartz glass soon!
@@AdvancedTinkering
Some quirky characteristics maybe of interest according to this article but not something you would normally encounter in a typical lab environment.( D.W. Jeppson and coworkers (1978) ) LITHIUM LITERATURE REVIEW:
LITHIUM'S PROPERTIES AND INTERACTIONS
"Liquid lithium will not react with oxygen or carbon dioxide in air at its melting point in the absence of water; but 10 to 15 parts per-million (ppm) moisture will cause lithium to react with air, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide at room temperature. "
It sort of reminded me of this other topic on iron rusting but I digress.
"Dr. G. T. Moody has shown that if very special precautions are taken to exclude all traces of carbon dioxide, then iron may be left in contact with pure oxygen and water for many weeks without undergoing any change. In one of the experiments thirty times as much oxygen as is required to convert the whole of the iron into oxide was passed during the course of a few weeks, but there was absolutely no rust. But if the air were not freed from carbon dioxide rusting commenced at once, and in seventy-two hours the whole of the metal was corroded. There would seem to be no basis, therefore, for the assumption that iron can be caused to rust by pure water and pure oxygen only."
As if that weren't enough minutia/trivia to read, even fused quartz can vary in makeup. From QSI Quartz Scientific Inc.
Properties of Fused Silica
OH content
In addition to metallic impurities, fused quartz and fused silica also contain water present as OH units. OH content influences the physical properties like attenuation and viscosity. General, high OH contents means lower use temperature. Typical values are given in the table. Electrically fused quartz has the lowest hydroxyl content (< 1 – 30 ppm) since it is normally made in vacuum or a dry atmosphere. Hydroxyl content in this range is not fixed in the glass structure. It can go up or down depending on the thermal treatment and amount of moisture to which the quartz glass is exposed at elevated temperature. Flame fused quartz has significantly more hydroxyl (150 – 200 ppm) since fusion occurs in a hydrogen/ oxygen flame. Due to the production method synthetic fused silica has similar high OH contents of up to 1000 ppm.
All other alkali and alkaline earth metals also react (more or less strongly) with glass.
How do you actually prevent this when distilling the alkali metals?
Incidentally, hot conc. phosphoric acid attacks glass, too.
I never had problems when distilling cesium. I tried distilling NaK once but the metal did bump a lot. In none of those cases was I able to see any damage done to the glass. The glass used for the cesium looked like new after cleaning it.
The glassware used for the NaK hat some milky spots at the bottom. But I'm not sure if they were there before.
The only cases I noticed the glass being affected was when creating a plasma inside the glass to look at the spectral colors of the gaseous metal.
@@AdvancedTinkering Lithium and of course the alkaline earth metals seem to react more aggressive. This makes sense because you can make the other alkaline metals with the help of Li or Mg. But on the other hand I already saw how burning Na reduced sand back to black silicone - I guess so it could do with glass, too.
Yes, it probably depends on the temperature. Maybe, at some point, I will test at which temperature the other alkali metals react with glass.
so carbon and sand could burn together? is the reaction self sustaining ?
Für den Algorithmus
Für den Algorithmus!!
Wow, makes me wonder if someone discovered that by an accident 😅
So this is lithium thermite. Nice
Yes, you could call it that.
🤨🤨🤨 this is gonna be dangerous... and fun!!
Der Betreiber dieses Kanals muss im stehen koten, da sein überdimensionalenes Glied sonst im Wasser hängt.
🤤
Ich fänd es besser wenn du als deutscher auch deutsche videos machen würdest. Ich finde im deutschsprachigen Raum gibt es in Chemie keine solchen (guten) Videos. Im englischen hingegen schon. Bitte in Zukunft auf deutsch! Ansonsten schönes Video
Danke für das Feedback! Sobald es auf YouTube möglich ist, werde ich die Videos mit deutscher und englischer Tonspur veröffentlichen. Leider ist das Feature noch nicht allen Kanälen zugänglich.
It's like thermite but with lithium and silicon dioxide instead of aluminium and iron oxide. Styropyro and the Gayest Person on Youtube would love to hear about this!
@AdvancedTinkering - 2022-08-03
Für alle deutschen Zuschauer gibt es jetzt einen deutschen Untertitel!
@wtfomgok - 2022-08-04
Danke =)
@AdvancedTinkering - 2022-08-04
Gerne! Ich brauche noch etwas Übung mit den Untertiteln. Falls es Probleme gibt, einfach Bescheid sagen.
@EvgenyPakhomov - 2022-08-04
Seems like they're in German even when you select English. Edit: ah, you've been told that in a different comment.
@ipadize - 2022-08-05
Gibt's auch einen Übertitel?
@PS-vk6bn - 2022-09-05
@@ipadize "Warum man niemals Lithium in Glasgeräten erhitzen sollte"