Elias Experiments - 2024-03-30
In this video I show how potash or potassium carbonate is transformed into potassium metal. The process in relatively simple in theory: Magnesium metal is used as a reducing agent and the following reaction will occur: K2CO3 + 3Mg -- 2K + C + 3 MgO. After the reaction is done the metal can be distilled, yielding pure potassium metal. In pratice this took a couple of trials to get the conditions right and my most succesfull attempt yet is demonstrated in this video. The plan is to later scale this up, so we can build an intergalactic potassium metal empire. Thanks to Advanced Tinkering for filming this video and providing the necessary equipment. You can find his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@UC2M2T4FSz1kSqNhhL-n9R9A Here is my previous video on making potassium metal, that is also quoted in this video: https://youtu.be/esnj2Dxwwoo
better clean your labstand
I have more important things to do :P
Lets make this comment blow up!
Please don't :3
And thus the Streisand effect was put into motion...
We'll see haha :D
5:35 I did not expect this bomb to burst into mineral oil farts. The fact that nobody laughed makes it even funnier.
Lol not really our kind of humor I guess :D
6:33 That sound is too relateable 😂
Haha that's how these things usually go :D
He’s active!
Oh I am so glad to hear from you! ;-)
With the copious amounts of obvious dangers you've presented, I'm rather offended that I didn't receive an invite.
If you would have asked I would have invited you. Next time you can join us :D
Potassium is a strange metal and the release from its compounds is most fascinating. I couldn´t believe that you put your hand in NaK. Many thanks for sharing with us.
I wondered about that as well as touching the metal with the bare hand (the oxide coating may protect it but the potassium hydroxide formed with moister is corrosive). May this is akin to people walk on fire embers.
Thank you very much for your kind feedback! I made an entire video about putting my hand in it, you can find it on my channel. ;-)
Yes, touching potassium metal is actually similar to walking on fire ambers. If you don't touch it very long and clean your hand afterwards you will most likely be fine.
He did not literally touch it. Hand was covered in oil.
@@lajoswinkler That´s the magician´s stunt.
bro putting his hand in NaK like its water 😂😂
I am a little bit more careful with NaK actually :D
Great video! I had a lot of fun that day!
But I can't believe how many of the comments approve of your dirty lab stand :D
I had a lot of fun too. Haha the lab stand sparked some interesting discussions :D
Nurdrage was doing a similar process for sodium, creating the metal by first reducing a salt with magnesium, however he eventually moved on to doing it in mineral oil with a tertiary alcohol catalyst. I don't know if the yields would be better, but I would guess you will lose a lot less material to the incineration process. While his video is mostly directed at using sodium, there is a similar method for doing potassium using a different catalyst. It also seems that reducing the potash from KCO3 to KO or KOH by heating would also improve yield. Still, this looks like the fun way to do it.
By far his most in-depth series ever, and I loved every second of it!
Yes I have seen Nurdrages series and it was amazing. You can probably achieve better yields with his process, but it is also very difficult to scale up, which is what we are trying to do here.
Reducing K2CO3 to KO or KOH by heating to improve the yield is more or less impossible for practical reasons. There is no way you can easily get K2CO3 this hot that it will decompose.
NurdRage also made potassium metal with this process a long time ago (and that was the inspiration for doing the same with sodium), but the video was unlisted for some reason.
Yeah I saw that too, I hope he picks the series back up with potassium metal, that would be incredibly amazing.
Yeah I saw that too, I hope he picks the series back up, that would be incredibly amazing :D
I've seen a lot of crazy things in my life but one I never imagined was metal being distilled. Color me impressed.
Haha, thank you for the kind feedback ;-)
Couldn't stop laughing at the final KOH Mg test, now THAT is some real science! The only annoying thing is that magnesium turnings aren't terribly cheap either, but at least they're available at lower prices than potassium metal.
Haha, glad you enjoyed that! :D Magnesium turnings are soooo much cheaper for me then potassium metal. Like two orders of magnitude cheaper.
If you can find a machine shop in your area that works on magnesium you can get turnings for very cheap or even for free.
@@EliasExperiments fascinating chemistry video excellent quality sir very well done keep up the good work
Thank you so much!
@@EliasExperiments I live in South Australia it's completely legal to buy small amounts of potassium metal online here (no more than one container that contains no more than 100 grams of potassium) but as you pointed out in this video potassium is very expensive to buy
Making some explosive metal with dangerous methods? You got my view + like.
Haha, thank you!
Fantastic, i had been wondering about using a carbonate, that ending was awsome to.
Glad you enjoyed it, thank you for the feedback! ;-)
The bowel movements of this set up are also richtig geil.
Lol haha yeah angry growling pump XD
very cool appreciate your time and effort.
Thank you for the kind feedback! ;-)
Next video you can show us your fire extinguishers.
Haha I actually do have two :D
Great video. Keep up the cool experiments!
Thanks, will do!
@@EliasExperiments How about making and experimenting with hydroiodic acid?
Sounds interesting. Maybe, if I find a good use for it ;-)
@@EliasExperiments I hope so. I'm very curious aboud HI acid because there is little info about it. On the the sciencemadness wiki it's described as:
"one of the strongest mineral acids"
" very strong, corrosive acid."
"the most elusive hydrohalic acid"
I would love to see reactions with Al, Fe and chicken bone.
WOW !!!! I very much Liked this video .
Thank You .
Thank you for the kind feedback! ;-)
That sound is unforgettable.
Lol
really nice process!
Thank you!
That's a nice lab stand
Lol, thank you :D
Great work! I might've missed it, but if you're going to distill it off anyway, why not simply use potassium chloride? It seems to be easier to obtain (as non-sodium salt in many stores) and I don't think it has the same fiery initial reaction.
Thank you! I did not want to go into detail about this in this video, because most people would probably find that boring. I tried to use KCl and Mg, but I never obtained a useful amount of potassium. You need much higher temperatures for this reaction to work and at these temperatures the KCl and Mg start to distill too. So you would need a colum to distill it, which is not really pratical for at home purposes :D
@@EliasExperimentsThis is very interesting, I wish you had included it since already people are suggesting it in the comments.
Fine I will include it in my upcoming video where we scale this up.
This is an excellent result. Potassium hydroxide might be better, but its problem is that it melts a lot easier (leading to loss of intimate mixing) and has a lot more water inside, so the extra yield might just be gobbled down.
I suggest getting a small tank of argon and keeping things far from any air. Well done.
Thank you! I have tried it with potassium hydroxide and you can see the results at the end of this video. It burns way to violently for it to be useful. I store my K under kerosene for now and it seems fine.
Great video
Thanks!
One has to admire your passion to a lab experiment 👏 A seldom property even in the academic world.
Thank you for the kind feedback ;-)
10:13 nice rocket fire test!
Haha, thank you!
Ihr hättet fast die Hecke abgefackelt! 😂 Nicht gut! Die war so trocken, die hättet Ihr nicht mehr aufhalten können!
Das war mitten im Winter und quasi Dauerregen. Da wäre nichts gebrannt, wenn ich die 10 Minuten mit einem Flammenwerfer behandelt hätte.
Your neighbors must love you.😆
They don't haha
Dr. Strangelove and rocket engines. Good times!
Thanks for the interesting video.
Lol thank you for the kind feedback :D
That was really cool.
Thank you!
freakin' cool fireworks at the end!
Thank you!
"It just shows that I'm working."
Is a mentality that I stand by but my boss hates.
Lol I admit that it isn't the best excuse always :D
60% is really good, best I've got is around 30% on a small scale run using KOH and Al powder
I actually tried to repeat your video on a larger scale and it blew up on me under vacuum. I wish I had filmed that, but I am afraid the KOH + Al Method doesn't scale too well.
@@EliasExperiments Damn that's a shame, good to know though, I guess it's not a reaction you can control very easily
Yeah good to know and I would not recommend repeating that :D
You generally only have to worry about Tetanus when rusty iron is in contact with soil for long periods of time, hence why its cliche for a rusty nail on the ground that penetrates a foot to cause Tetanus.
That's interesting. Please explain that to Advanced Tinkering XD
The reason, if true, could be enhanced bacteria growth due to iron ion availability (which usually is a scarce resource for them). But I'm not convinced.
Rust, of course, has nothing to do with tetanus. It's just that things that are rusty are more likely to have been in contact with stuff like mud. Clostridium tetani is found in dirt.
Rust and tetanus is just an urban myth.
@@lajoswinkler rust has a lot of surface area for bacteria to cling in, and a higher probability of cutting/penetrating you, hence the connection.
Lol thank you for all the input, I never thought I will learn that much about tetanus from one random comment in a video. :D
Ihr wahnsinnigen 😁, super!
Haha, danke Dir!
5:37
Now that's a brown note
Haha :D
I love his accent. Strangely sounds like Inspector Clouseau.
Lol I have been told that a couple of times :D
You can use KCl instead of K2CO3. One thing that is created using carbonate is magnesium carbide. It will react similar to calcium carbide but generates methane.
Not correct. The reaction releases propyne.
No you can't actually substitute K2CO3 for KCl. You need far higher temperatures for KCl and Mg to react and at those temperatures both substances already start to evaporate. I could not obtain useful amounts of potassium with that reaction. Magnesium Carbide sounds interesting, I never thought about that forming during this reaction.
@@EliasExperiments How do you find out the necessary temperature for such a reaction? Speaking of chlorides, Mg will react with SrCl2*6H2O.
It is quite simple, you mix the reagents together and see what happens when you heat them up :D
The labstand looks fine
I agree!
You have the correct accent for this job !!! ;)
Lol, thank you!
Wow, I thought that this potassium extraction method only works with potassium hydroxide, I didn't know that magnesium would also react with potassium carbonate! Who would've thought that potassium can be made this easily without electrolysis?
Yeah I also only discovered that by trying a bunch of different things.
Finally someone talks about the reaction of Mg and carbonates. I always wondered what the products were. Does magnesium free other metals from their carbonates as well? Metals like Li, Sr, Ba, Cs.
I found out that Ti reacts with carbonates as well, does it free the metals in the carbonate?
With the Ti you would have to test it, but it is also more expensive then Mg, so the motivation to try it is rather low.
The KOH plus Mg made a pretty good rocket. Flames 25 feet high or more. Impressive.
Yes indeed :D
Sweet!
Thank you!
Mans just rawdoggin NaK with his hands 😱
I made an entire video about that phenomena on my channel.
Hey Elias, even though I still haven't gotten around to making videos yet, its funny to see that we are both working on a similar reaction! I'm using sodium carbonate and aluminum instead in an attempt to make sodium metal. I believe it should also work even better with molten NaOH and aluminum, which I will try next, and which was also the original reason that I looked into this to begin with. It would also be easier to do on a large scale unlike the magnesium and potassium hydroxide since the reaction should be less exothermic when using aluminum based on the enthalpy equation. The key behind the success of these somewhat counterintuitive reactions is quite interesting, it's the fact that the metal reducing agent (magnesium in your case) wants oxygen REALLY badly, and specifically it wants it even more than the potassium, which you would normally think would be the more reactive metal here. After a lot of research and equation building, and enthalpy calculations, I've found that metals in the alkaline earth group and metals in the 3B column (which includes lanthanides and actinides as well as scandium and yttrium) also love oxygen to a similar extent. it seems that 2-3 valence electrons is the sweet spot for forming happy stable oxides, additionally I found that 1-2 valence electrons is the sweet spot for halides, or at least chlorides. it seems that a near 1-1 ratio of metal to oxidizer or even a 1-1 ratio of cation to anion is the most stable configuration. With this knowledge it makes sense to hunt for another such "oxygen loving" metal in the 3A column (which is similar to the 3B column) and if you look, it does, it has aluminum, and as you would expect its very reactive toward oxygen, and prefers oxygen over a halide such as chlorine or bromine. I'm pretty sure that this concept can be expanded to other areas of chemistry and to other compounds and other reactions as well. To sum it up in anthropomorphic terminology, metals have preferences over which oxidizer they hang around with, and specifically, they like ones that are the exact opposite of themselves, like sodium and chlorine or magnesium and oxygen. I like to think of it like oxygen is simply a better fit for magnesium than for potassium, and the potassium is essentially still waiting for an actual halide to come along and satisfy it, to make a more permanent compound, a more permanent solution for the potassium than the oxygen which it only settled for since it had no other option at the time.
Anyway, if you look into the enthalpy calculations, the reaction of aluminum or magnesium or most of the other metals mentioned earlier with oxygen produces significantly more energy per bond than potassium does with oxygen per bond, so there is a net enthalpy gain from swapping the oxygen from one metal to the other, it's honestly a lot like thermite. Also, it doesn't matter that much if it's a hydroxide or carbonate instead of an oxide since all the metals mentioned are already obviously more reactive than hydrogen and carbon, and could easily rip the oxygen from carbon dioxide or water, and metal hydroxides and carbonates are stoichiometrically the same as the respective oxide plus water or CO2. Anyway, this allows for a not only feasible, but very exothermic reaction between the metal oxide or hydroxide or carbonate of potassium and the metal magnesium, or aluminum (magnesium works better though) and this is all simply because the magnesium/aluminum can produce more energy per bond with oxygen than potassium with that same oxygen. So I guess the lesson to learn here is that potassium/sodium isn't necessarily always the most reactive, its just more reactive with halides (and probably some other oxidizers) than magnesium or aluminum is with those same oxidizers, but magnesium and aluminum can actually be MORE reactive than potassium or sodium with a few select oxidizers, namely oxygen. Anyway, this was quite long, but that's mostly because I found this very interesting when I first learned about it, (for science!). Anyway, if you are interested in what I've been up to or want more information about the enthalpy changes in the reactions, or other possible reactions and equations of this same type, then just ask me and I will see if I can find where I wrote them down...
Another great video as always! -MetalMaster
I would guess that sodium carbonate an aluminium is too unreactive of a combination, so I would not expect this to work. But I have been wrong about things like this before. NaOH and Al might work, it might also blow up on you :D KOH and Al blew up on me und vacuum, so it might be a similar story with NaOH.
That is very interesting about the compound stabilities.
Thank you so much for this very detailed explanation.
A couple people have asked me about more in depth theory behind this reaction and from now on I will direct them to your comment, if I get asked.
@@EliasExperiments Thanks! and I guess I will have to test these reactions to know for sure. :)
4:50 : "Trust me, I'm an expert... oh, I've made a mistake".
And that's how you become expert.
Lol that is basically instant karma :D
8:10 Ominous crowing before you start the more dangerous part 🤣
Oh wow that's a funny coincidence :D
Very interesting video. If your stove were bigger, could you then use the 100g of each?
The plan is to scale this up in an upcoming video.
0:03 Does the NaOH crust not hurt your fingers or does it just not dissolve enough?
It is such a small amount covered in oil, it really is not a problem if I wash my hands directly afterwards.
@altxyz - 2024-03-30
Acidic rain: exist
Elias: - hold my beer
@EliasExperiments - 2024-03-31
I would scale this up a lot to help against acid rain haha :D