NurdRage - 2017-06-28
In this video we recover used gallium metal from aluminum using solvent extraction. Related videos: Gallium on aluminum baseball bat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXs_pbZyaFg Recover Used Gallium From Aluminum (sodium hydroxide method): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUSjWfBBu2Y Donate to NurdRage! Through Patreon (preferred): https://www.patreon.com/NurdRage Through Bitcoin: 1NurdRAge7PNR4ULrbrpcYvc9RC4LDp9pS Glassware generously provided by http://www.alchemylabsupply.com/ Use the discount code "nurdrage" for a 5% discount. Social media links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/NurdRage Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NurdRageYoutube/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nurdrageyoutube/
Nurdrage: "I am an idiot."
Me: "Wat iz kemistre?"
Made me laugh
You're not an idiot! Thanks for the great series.
A Nurdrage AND Nilered video, both in one day? Is it Christmas?
Onyx V.O. Not yet, you have to wait some months for Christmas.
In this video we show you i am an idiot... but you already knew that :)
hehehehe
Not sure if i'll see you before then, but happy Canada Day (July 1st) and Happy Independence Day (July 4th)!
Yeah, OK, you screwed up and made a mess that cost you some gallium. You didn't get hurt and that's what really matters. You may think that you failed and the result of the reaction was less than favorable, but think about this....
You just showed what not to do and you probably saved someone a bunch of frustration and likely encouraged them to keep working on their project. Even the pros make mistakes from time to time and it's refreshing to see the honesty in this video.
You get an F!
Sorry for the necropost, but I wonder if something working on the same principle as a dean-stark trap could work for liquid liquid extractions. If you are extracting into a heavier liquid from a lighter one, then a heavy return might work, with condensed pure solvent sinking through the the liquid you are extracting from. For light return you would have to make sure the solvent bubbled up through the other liquid. Perhaps just raise up the condenser, stick a tube on the bottom and run the tube into the bottom of the container?
You're too hard on yourself.
NurdRage can you make a video on how to make it?
Thank you for showing the failure! We all learn so much more from the failures of people who know what they are doing than from the videos of those who pretend to know what they are doing. Failure is ALWAYS an option. Anyone who claims otherwise has either never done anything worthwhile or is a liar. :)
Failures are always an opportunity, but this is less of teaching people about something and more showing that he's a human being and capable of making mistakes, even if he has a degree. All he did was get a little too overzealous adding sodium hydroxide to the solution, and it caused a foam-over. That was a lapse in judgement which resulted in a failure in spite of his knowledge, so there's really nothing to be learned with the exception of some common sense about following instructions. Sodium Hydroxide solutions can melt your skin off, and pure NaOH loves to burn you just from touching it with your skin, and most people are very aware of this. Frankly, if you need a demonstration as to why it's good common sense to carefully follow instructions about adding something most people know is dangerously corrosive to an aqueous solution then it raises the question of why you didn't have that common sense in the first place. NurdRage didn't really fail, he just wound up making an idiot of himself by his own admission because he didn't follow the instructions on the back of the cake box.
If the Mythbusters taught us anything about learning, it's that 'Failure is always an option.' is more accurately said as 'Failure is always an opportunity to learn.', and that it does have its limits. Even Adam himself admits that when you do something stupid when you know how to do it, failure is not an option.
You are still alive?
I thought you were dead because your channel went dark a few years ago
I am so glad you included the fail in the video NurdRage. I make mistakes like this constantly in the lab, and I'm glad a more professional chemist is willing to show the same things. I assure you, I'm more of an idiot.
You are my favorite idiot in the world! I enjoy your work so much
wow I wouldn't have thought so much would have been left in that powder. sorry about the boil over...were you watching YouTube and got distracted with Cody's "hydroponic" garden videos?
I don't remember how many years ago I subbed this channel, but I still enjoy watching it! :)
Imagine pranking your friends by giving them an aluminum bat, that's been treated gallium.
I'm glad you kept going and finished the process with what you had left.
Keep up the great vids dude. This is tge first time I have really taken an interest in Chemistry despite taking a class in both High School and College lol
That was a pretty good recovery from what you had left to work with. I was expecting a lot less! ;D
Even your dumbest failures are more succesfull than the average of our achievements.
What I want to know, is does indium react with aluminium in the same way if kept molten?
I'm so early loved the vid
Would a method similar to this be able to separate gallium from indium?
Thanks for the video! Just a quick question.... The final product seems pretty dirty, do you think it's because of iron impurities or is it just an gallium oxide layer?
Wonderful video :)
When I seen this, first though was: "You can make continuous liquid-liquid extraction on this from everything at once!"
And don't worry: mistakes like that happens all the time. It's very easy to rush a little too much, and chemistry never waits: it just boils out from vessel. Once again, great material and chemistry :)
When processing waste for PGM, I always use a polyethylene tray under my apparatus. If things go wrong - and they sometimes do - I washed things down and poured off the washings to continue recovery. Now of course platinum (and especially rhodium) are a lot more valuable than gallium but the same process should apply. As for your status as an idiot - BZZZ Wrong! True idiots never ever think they're idiots. Great work and showing your errors is probably at least as valuable as your successes.
Thank you for creating these videos!
I have a suggestion. Making ammonium dichromate from stainless steel waste such as turnings and performing some experiments with the product.
A catalytic hydrogenation with Ni and/or MoS2 would also be interesting but I don't know if I'm alone with this opinion.
Oh the classic boiling over error
Always a huge mess
Honestly my more common one is forgetting to close the stopcock on my sep funnel
Equally messy more stupid of a mistake
stop being so self depreciating i like looking at it
I wish for more practical chemistry videos. This is industrial style chemistry that is... well... You know. For fun?
Looks like you might need to repaint your hot plate :P
Maybe you can use Dean-Stark apparatus...cooled by ice water!
Another awesome video, thanks!
Nice. Similar to the SX/EW process in copper refining and PUREX process for the separation of uranium and plutonium.
Cheers,
Mark
**********************
welcome back brother! been waiting for a new video.
Superb as always.. My only request on this is I wish I knew who you buy your platinized titanium electrodes from..
Could you please demonstrate Zone refining/melting someday?
Dear friend I am looking for a way to install meth ace crystal
To recover gallium from chloride - use gallium chloride melt electrolysis at low pressure.
As with the sodium gallium hydroxide, double salts and the reasons for their exact proportions are very interesting. Any explanation would be fantastic.
Where did you buy your platinum electrode?
Paul Beurich watch his episode about platinum he says he got them from a website
gallium is quite expencive so that ether method is waaaaay better
It looked like you were opening the separation funnel in between shaking it. Is that done to reduce the pressure from ether vapor?
most likely yes
Diethyl ether has a potentially explosive reaction with oxygen. Makes some kind of peroxide, don't recall exact details.
Distilling ether is groovy and all, but it strips out the stabilizers.
We had a 2 liter bottle of diethyl ether that was nearly 15 years old; less than 1/2 had been used, but it had been opened 100's of time. Yes, there was a log-book.
The fire department came, asked a few questions, then the bomb-squad came.
They carried out the ether in a little armored cart, the cart jockey in full bomb-blast gear.
Controlled detonation followed, according to the police report.
Then we found a 4 pound jar of bone-dry picric acid with a rusty steel lid...
Yay! New video!
hey nurdrage , make calcium carbide in lab .
I'm really late to seeing this video, but I'm curious why not salt out the gallium chloride from the aqueous layer into the diethyl ether?
hope some of your former students saw this. like i tell the students to be careful when making grignards. add the magnesium slowly don´t cut it, minimize the surface area. you know the drill. then one day i made a grignard reagent. dunno what i needed it for and given i did this a few times i got overconfident. "nah don´t need to be that slowl. i know it won´t boil over THAT easily" guess who spent half a day cleaning his fumehood. and who had all his students laughing at. (but hey: after that they listened if i told them to go slowly with something)
Could we use this same process to bring Harambe back?
Just followed on facebook and instagram😁
Awesome video! IDIOT=I Do Interesting Organized Tests...
I am wondering if its easily possible to make that extraction into a cycle that re-uses the solvent to extract more out of the solution and pumps it back to the distillation
4:35 Not a professional chemist... yet, but I was yelling at the screen for a different reason. You get more efficient solvent extractions if you wash the aqueous solution with separate, smaller fractions of ether. For example, three separate washes with 100 mL of clean ether will recover more GaCl than one large wash using 300 mL of clean ether. You would have been better off splitting the ether you had between the two aqueous solutions and collecting smaller fractions from each one.
It's impossible to know how much is too much, until you've used too much, and experienced the consequences.
It did hurt to watch, but I think that's because I'm experiencing the failure myself, vicariously through you.
I think that image of the pile of NaOH, and the immediately bubbling-over water will stay burned in my brain for some time, and prevent that sort of failure from happening to me in the future. :)
Great content.
Safety Lucas - 2017-06-28
3:28 Cellllllllllsius.