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
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
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
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.
@@EliasExperimentsThings not working as planned can be very interesting and also give the video a nice story arc.
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 ;-)
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
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.
6:33 That sound is too relateable 😂
Haha that's how these things usually go :D
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
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
what was the equipment used in 1:15 to burn the mixture? did you make it made yourself?
The steel still was "self-made" with a lot of help from Fabian, Advanced Tinkering and Markus.
@ ohh ok
bro putting his hand in NaK like its water 😂😂
I am a little bit more careful with NaK actually :D
Wie lang hat ein durchlauf gebraucht? Ich möchte den Versuch ebenfalls replizieren und ein ungefähres Zeitfenster haben. Wie lange für das herstellen von 100g Kalium?
Mit dem Aufbau würde ich mindestens anderthalb bis drei Tage rechnen für 100 g K.
@@EliasExperiments Kein wunder das du auf ein größeres Design umgestiegen bist XD.
Ja von nix kommt nix :D
He’s active!
Oh I am so glad to hear from you! ;-)
@Elias Experiments - Was it explained somewhere why you are not using an electrolytic reaction?
I did not explain it, but that is a lot more difficult. I don't think anyone on youtube really extracted useful amounts with it. Okay maybe with a castner cell and I might try that in the future.
Fantastic, i had been wondering about using a carbonate, that ending was awsome to.
Glad you enjoyed it, thank you for the feedback! ;-)
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.
One has to admire your passion to a lab experiment 👏 A seldom property even in the academic world.
Thank you for the kind feedback ;-)
Am I missing something? How do you reduce to potassium metal using magnesium which is lower on the reactivity series? I thought perhaps you had made potassium by some form of decomposition instead but even if you have the high temperature to decompose K2CO3 it would still only produce K2O, not elemental potassium,
That's not exactly how it works. You are thinking about aqueous solutions and even there these effects can be turned around by other phenomena. The reason we can reduce the potassium metal with magnesium metal is that the resulting magnesium oxide is more stable than potassium oxide. Also the reduction of the CO2 from the carbonate by the magnesium provides a lot of energy for the reaction. Stuff like that is rather complicated and the easiest way to figure it out is often just to do the experiment. That's all that counts in the end anyways ;-)
@@EliasExperiments That makes a lot of sense
NaK + bare hands might not go well.
Also where do you get the K2CO3?
I made a video were I put my hand in NaK. You can find it on my channel as "Hand vs highly explosive metal" The K2CO3 I ordered online on ebay.
@@EliasExperiments Neat!
When i was a boy my family would let me "play" with potassium and sodium. Taught me a lot at a young age about chemical safety! Now these production videos got me thinkin!
Oh wow that's crazy, today that would be a huge scandal :D
hallo, was hast du da für ein fett zwischen metall und glasrohr geschmiert ? siliconfett ? wäre da nicht so eine metallspange besser.
Ja das war schlifffett soweit ich weiß auf Silikonbasis. Ich verstehe nicht ganz, wie die Metallspange das Fett ersetzen soll.
@@EliasExperiments sorry war von mir falsch formuliert. das fett hatte nix mit der spange zu tun. mir ging es nur darum weil euch das glas durch eure schraubspange gesprungen ist. ich meinte nur wäre da nicht so eine einfache federstahlspange besser ? oder muss das richtig fest sitzen ? vakuum ziehts ja auch noch mit zusammen.
Ah okay verstehe, ja wenn ich wüsste wo man so eine federstahlspange her bekommt ist das eine gute Idee, die sich definitiv mal lohnt zu testen. ;-)
würde das mit jedem alkali und erd alkali metall funktionieren? also Rb2CO3 + 3 Mg = 2Rb + 3 MgO + C SrCO3 + 3 Mg = Sr + 3MgO + C usw?
Die Triebkraft hinter der Reaktion dürfte einerseits die Flüchtigkeit des zu reduzierenden Metalls sein und andererseits die Stabilität des Oxids des zu oxidierenden Metalls. Ich würde stark vermuten, dass das mit Rubidium funktioniert (Rubidium ist relativ flüchtig, Magnesiumoxid ist deutlich bevorzugt) aber mit Strontium wohl eher weniger (weniger flüchtig als Magnesium, Strontiumoxid ist auch relativ stabil).
Also mit Rb2CO3 höchstwahrscheinlich, mit Na2CO3 müsste ich es erst noch testen und mit Lithium und allen anderen Erdalkalimetallen eher nicht, da der Siedepunkt deutlich zu hoch ist. Für Magnesiumcarbonat würde das auch gar keinen Sinn ergeben, weil man im Endeffekt weniger Magnesium raus bekommt als man einsetzen würde. Zudem ist das auch viel zu günstig um es herzustellen. Erdalkalimetalle sind generell schwierig in einem Labor herzustellen, wegen den hohen Schmelz- und Siedepunkten für die verhältnismäßig hohe Reaktivität. Vielleicht ein Projekt für zukünftige Videos. ;-)
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.
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
Making some explosive metal with dangerous methods? You got my view + like.
Haha, thank you!
The bowel movements of this set up are also richtig geil.
Lol haha yeah angry growling pump XD
what are you going to do with it? I personally do not believe the coulombic explosion of the '15 Nature paper is fully explanatory and there is more to be revealed in the details there. Maybe that's a possibility for exploration.
That is certainly an interesting research project, even though very difficult. The first plan is actually to scale is up to get kilos of K metal and then make another video like my sodium and water video :D
Hey Elias, I have a random question, other than thy labs and advanced tinkering, have you collaborated with any other channels?
I have helped the Pain Rankers make a video with Devils Toothpaste and I have talked with sciencebob about giant elephants toothpaste experiments. I have helped Explosions&Fire ship a package from europe to australia and I have gotten help from NurdRage concerning a nafion membrane. Also Chemiolis has helped me with thumbnail design on this video. There are probably some more I have forgotten and I would certainly like to do a lot more collaborations in the future.
@@EliasExperiments ok, thanks. 👍
So how much did it cost to make this potassium compared to buying it? Just the consumables, some of the equipment can be used again, I presume.
Comparing prices at such a small scale experimental scale does not really make much sense, because the time invested is much more valuable. It would have been way cheaper to just buy the potassium metal instead of making it like this. If we scale it up, this might be a different story. But that is also unlikely to be honest :D
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
very cool appreciate your time and effort.
Thank you for the kind feedback! ;-)
Wie lange hast du Gebraucht?
Wofür genau? Für den Methodenentwicklung vielleicht so ein Monat und zum durchführen des Experiments mit aufräumen so einen halben Tag bis Tag, je nachdem wie gut alles klappt.
Is there a reason you cannot use alcohol-catalyzed magnesium in oil? Or would that be too boring, and the wacky method is the fun of it?
To my knowledge, the alcohol-route will work as well but it will need more sophisticated conditions and equipment. The solvent-free synthesis presented here is more robust.
I completly agree with what Frank says.
Well, that's completely fair enough.
Can MgO replace by other metal oxide, e,g FeO?
Any metal less reactive the potassium should be able to do the work.
We start with Mg not with MgO and I highly doubt Fe would be able to replace Mg under the same conditions. Maybe if you make it much hotter.
That sound is unforgettable.
Lol
Very curious . . . Why would magnesium reduce potassium from its compounds?
Isn't potassium much more reactive than magnesium?
Because magnesium oxide is very stable and potassium oxide very unstable. Also most of the energy in this reaction comes from the magnesium metal reducing the carbon. So the overall energy balance of this reaction is highly in favor for the formation of potassium metal.
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.
Im not understanding how did u use Mg as a reducing agent. Potassium is higher in the electrochemical series so it has a lower tendency to accept ekectrons. As far as i know metallurgy of Na K and Al can only be done by electrolytic methods l.
Because the magnesium reacts with the carbonate first which releases a lot of energy and the remaining K2O is quite unstable, while MgO is much more stable.
@@EliasExperiments Oh so its thermodynamically unfavorable but entropically favorable?
No, if that would be the case the reaction would be endothermic, which it obviously isn't. Potassium metal, carbon and magnesium oxide are the thermodinamically favored products in this system.
Smart you cleaned your labstand with fire at the end
Yeah, right? :D
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.
könntest du mal in einer geschmolzenen salz elektrolyse von uranylhydroxid uran als metall herstellen?
Theoretisch ja, praktisch könnte das gesetzliche Probleme geben und Kontamination etc. ist auch so eine Sache.
You dipping your hand in NaK is one of the scariest things I've seen on YouTube, and I watched a guy make Nitrogen Trichloride in a glass container, and another guy make TATP.
I actually devoted an entire video on my channel just to that. It is not as bad as you might think.
where did you get your stainless to glass coupling?
It is basically a regular KF25 flange. The metal you can buy the glass you can buy to or make it yourself as Advanced Tinkering demonstrated on his channel.
That's a nice lab stand
Lol, thank you :D
The KOH plus Mg made a pretty good rocket. Flames 25 feet high or more. Impressive.
Yes indeed :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
10:40 - Ah! A failed pipe bomb. How quaint!
It went exactly as planned ;-)
WOW !!!! I very much Liked this video .
Thank You .
Thank you for the kind feedback! ;-)
Very fun. Even the crow was impressed.
Haha yes indeed
@@EliasExperiments😂
@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
@Molecule_Madness - 2024-08-15
Bro has no fear. He just put his Hand in e Mama metric fucktone of NaK