2:13 Dry the wets (or they won't sieve) 3:07 Wet the drys (4 times) 3:48 Dry the wets 4:16 Wet the drys 5:16 Semidry the wets 5:22 Wet the wets 5:36 Dry the wets 5:49 Superdry the wets 7:44 Superdry the superdrys until they're wet (?) 8:35 Wet the drys 9:38 Wet the wets 10:54 Dry the wets 11:09 Wet the drys 11:12 Dry the wets ...
Analytical grade dirt 😂 You are funny. And brave! I wouldn't dare to touch grass, especially without PSE! 😮 Nice video 👌 Edit: Fun fact: That's pretty much what NIST Standards are. Standard products, but maximally homogeneous and tested a huge number of times for statistical use for analytical labs, to compare results to see how accurate they are. So you can buy a jar of NIST peanut butter... For 100x the usual price. But it's fair, for use as standard for fatty acid analysis for example.
You probably know this already, but the ground is made up of multiple layers. The surface layer, topsoil, is rich in organic material. You probably want to dig a bit deeper, or find a patch of eroded soil, to get some dirt that doesn't start out with nearly as much organic impurities.
Yes, digging down until the soil is lighter than the top is good, just mineral soil, almost no organic junk, a good place to pick up too is on river beds, the water already do the work on washing it up.
Even better, just go down to a beach to gather your dirt there and- oh. The point is to extract the silicon dioxide from regular, dirty, topsoil. Filtering off the organic material is part of the journey.
@@MGSLurmey eh, dirt in general have a lot of non organic contaminants, like metal oxides, who are tricky to remove from the silicon dioxide, but in a way, the organic junk add a bit of fun for the extraction (and beach sand has contaminants too)
Im amazed of your Channel, I've got only few chemistry practices in my biochem eng undergrad, therefore I have to educate myself with Channels like yours, nile red, that chemist, etc. Thank you for contributing to my learning,
awesome video! just a few useful tips: it will be easeier to melt the hydroxide first and then add the raw SiO2, then also its quite bad for the glass frit to filter the silicate-silicon dioxide-hydroxide mix because there is some hydroxide left so i'd use a buchner instead.
Your filming is actually really high quality. I would like to reward you for the value you've given me and encourage you to keep going, do you accept donations? Even if it's small
I am glad that you like my content! I don't have something like paypal for one time donations, but I have Patreon, and the first tier is $3 so if you want you can support me this way.
@Amateur.Chemistry thank you for the thanks at the end of the video :) I'm looking forward to your next videos, especially the spicy ones ;) the first one was great... Alfred N would be proud of you :)
there is a way to avoid the sodium hydroxide step, which involves either crushing the sand to a very fine powder, or finding very fine sand. the particle size simply needs to be smaller than the crystal size of the minerals in the rock that the sand came from, this means that every individual mineral is exposed, and can be reacted with. and the only thing that will remain is the silicon dioxide grains, which are already silicon dioxide, which means no sodium hydroxide necessary.
Sooo, you should have used some water, as a flux, to get the reaction going in the can. What you where left with was still sodium hydroxide and silicon dioxide . What dissolved was the sodium hydroxide, and when you added sulfuric acid you made sodium sulfate. The solution already being saturated, it came out of solution immediately. And at no point later did you add enough water to dissolve more than ~50g of sodium sulfate. So if there was 66g before you added 150ml water, there would still be 16g sodium sulfate undissolved in the solution. Just think about it, granular sand has about 160g/100ml, but after the "reaction" you still had almost 200ml of sand, where is the product coming from? If you stir all your product in a 500ml beaker of water, how much remains undissolved?
It'll mostly get alkaline and group two metals, like calcium, sodium and potassium, and maybe a bit of transition ones like iron... But unless he get it to a specialized analyzer, we would see just a mess of combined metals, hydroxides and oxides.
You'll find it in modded Factorio :P Even fairly hardcore minecraft modpacks, like GTNH, still rely a lot on magical electrolysers and the like which give you pure products for magic. Though with GTNH, fewer and fewer of those remain with each update, replaced with more realistic processes. I'm actually working on a game where separating things is a major part of any refining and you're always working with complex materials rather than pure molecules/elements; I'm sure there's around 100 players in the world who are really going to enjoy that ("Pyanodon's mods are _way_ too simplified!") :D
oh dear lord the moment I saw the title I was like you are super not suppose to do this at home. My father is in semiconductor sector and he took me to every plant on the steps except for the one that does this if that says anything as to how dangerous/dirty this stuff was. to be fair, it is not complicated and people do that on a industrial scale regularly. it just involves so much hazardous chemical and super dirty in terms of pollution (well low profit margin + not give a shit about environment back in that time) that very few regions allow those factories to operate (in a profitable way) iirc they essentially dissolve the pretty pure stuff in large amount of HF and get high purity silicon that way. also while you are at it how about try to grow some single crystalline silicon and cut them into wafers? that would be cool edit: after watching the video it isn’t as bad as I expected, glad that is the case edit2: did some quick research on how they do it. NOW I know why my father won’t let me there. Think about huge reactor vessel filled with heated H2 and SiH4 to get 11N Si. If that thing bursts the plant explode kind of stuff. closest I have been to SiH4 is in a CVD line and single crystalline silicon growing column. Yeah also have seen multiple vets of HF in half inch thick teflon and other stuff that are safe until anything went wrong. Also get to see SiH4 blow up once in the CCTV recording of an accident, nobody is hurt too bad though. scary stuff Also for anyone curious the 7N silicon pallets I get to see is a beautiful light blue color in a styrofoam texture. I am sure someone can figure out which process does that come from
Heh. I have plenty of sand in my yard with little organic matter- but in the Space Coast of Florida, most of the sand is just weathered coral and thus mostly calcium carbonate. I'd have to go a few hundred miles to find actual silicate sand.
.....OKAY,NOW TURN POLLUTED DIRT TO MOLTEN GLASS AT 1712.85 °C ,HEHEHEHE .....AND ALGAE TO DIRT AT 125 °C AS WELL,HEHE .......YUP,THATS A REFERENCE TO OXYGEN NOT INCLUDED.....KIND OF
4:44 Ahh, the poor mans reflux condenser! Love it. And use it too, despite working in a professional lab with lots of different reflux condensers. But time is money 👌
Pleas keep on doing such simple experiments. You use stuff that i can actually replicate and many other ! Pleas keep finding cool recepies to do with regular-ish compunds !
"technical grade dirt" made me laugh. I find cut-down butane cylinders make excellent "cans" for chemical reactions and melting low-melting-point metals.
Depending on the crystaline structure silicon dioxide dust can be very damaging to breath. The amorphous structure is not terrible, but fully crystaline silica dust is very hazardous.
Please do me a favor and look up how sedimentation works😏 Basically the sifting and washing steps are unnecessary and for the acid step, you would have a much cleaner starting material, which results in much less acid being used. Fun fact. Did you know that silicium dioxide is highly soluble in water and only the saturation point is rediciously low. But as soon as you remove siliciumdioxide out of the solution, it gets replenished from any possible source. So no matter what you try, in a glas container or with sand present, the solution is always saturated🤗
If I had access to a furnaceand was doing the same project, I think I would have put the dirt in a furnace first, maybe with an oxidizer to burn off the organic material. Would that have made any of the next steps easier or require less caustic chemicals for cleaning?
Could you sum the energy inputs needed to convert clean "sand" (not dirt, such as a nice mineable deposit) into silicon dioxide, in optimal conditions? Include the energy production of the reagents. Then, the energy needed to convert SiO2 into metalloid silicon - for use in building solar cells. I suspect a solar cell will never return more energy than was needed to produce it.
I mine metals from my soil. Primarily iron, copper, lead, zinc, and silver, with traces of cerium and other useful elements. Silicon dioxide is a waste product in these areas.
...i was thinking, you could have burned off the majority of the organic materials and washed the remaining salts away with water. The acid wash at this point would ne optional, but probably not necessary unless there was some really wierd contamination.
Some hot piranha solution would have removed all the organic bits prior to the conversion to silicate. Your sand would have been almost snow-white and have none of those black bits.
Aluminium oxide is as common as silicon oxide in dirt. And no, it doesn't dissolve in hydrochloric acid because it's embedded inside the crystals of sand. It reacts with sodium hydroxide and precipitates when adding acid the same as silicon oxide, so it does come over in the end product. But even ignoring that, you can see by the colour of the end product, that it is not pure in any sense and is contaminated with iron oxide and other contaminants. I expected more purification steps after that.
But sand is not necessarily silicone dioxide. If ir is inorganic, it will almost certainly be a silicate mineral. Pure silica (siO2) sand is very uncommon.
I will also mention that if you simply make some piranha solution, it will do pretty much every step for you all at the same time, except for removing the iron impurities. there may also be titanium and feldspar impurities.
Most Glass isn’t silicon dioxide - it is mix of sodium silicate and calcium silicate. Lenses are often Calcium Fluoride (no silicon at all). Glass is actually a state of matter…
It's funny, because it's a part that's entirely ignored in pretty much all games that include chemistry - you always have magical centrifuges and electrolysers that effortlessly separate stuff out. How do you get aluminium from clay? Just run it through an electrolyser! Nicely separated 100% pure batches of all the individual atoms. Real-life chemists would kill for magic machines like that :D How does electrolysing clay even work? Well... shut up, that's how! :D
6:19 I thought silicon can't form double bonds? Can this exist because there is a constant equilibrium where the double bond is between the 3 oxygens? curious.
It really avoids forming double bonds, which is where we get the wild variety of silicate minerals. Quartz does not have double bonds - each silicon atom is actually covalently bonded to _four_ oxygen atoms (but each of them is shared with another silicon atom). But molecular silicon dioxide does exist. And it indeed has two double bonds, and it is linear just like carbon dioxide. Of course, that's not what was produced here; that would be your typical SiO4 (4+). But I don't think it's all that wrong to draw molecular silicon dioxide - it does _form_ , it's just that it polymerises very easily for obvious reasons. The double bond rule is not a rule; more like a... guideline. You'll find there are many molecules where silicon forms double bonds, and they aren't _unstable_ , really - they just polymerise easily and lose those double bonds.
You can make water glass or silica gel - there are many 'recipes' in various chemistry textbooks (e.g. Armarego, Brauer, Vogel). It's relatively easy to make and much cheaper than professional chromatographic silica gels from chem suppliers. Various types of aluminas are also worth of exploring.
I don't know much about chemistry, but wouldn't adding hydrogen peroxide in the hydrochloric acid wash step help? Shouldn't it burn some of the carbon, so that you don't have to filter so much?
Silicon dioxide is mentioned in genesis 2, along with gold, and aromatic plants. "The gold of that land is good, there is onyx and aromatic plants there also" It's like they wanted us to build computers.
Great Video. I also would like to see, what we can get out of the first HCl-wash. For sure, there are Elements like Iron and some more inside. The next step we need, is to produce our own HCl and H2S04 from the stuff, we find in nature. 🙂
