Extracting strontium with a microwave 

I was so mentally stuck on kitchen appliances that when you said you were going to add CO2 to the solution, I jumped straight to "yes, put it in a sodastream you madman"

I see Tom got bored of the ice cream maker. Time to move onto an appliance that can do some chemistry

You roaming the wilderness for carbon is like an Australian wizard trying to find supplies for their potion.

As a non-chemist, i've been wracking my brain wondering where i know of uses for strontium from, because i knew it wasn't the fireworks example. It took me 30 minutes of going through all the chemistry youtube videos i've watched over the years to finally remember. Eve online. It's starbase fuel in eve online.

"i genuinely forget how fun this is" congratulations tom, you just discovered humanity's favorite ancient passtime: smashing rocks together!

Rusty hammer crystals and matress carbon. This is the kind of production quality that keeps me coming back.

Haha, I'm a ceramic glaze designer and was literally sitting here editing Strontium glazes as this video came up. Its amazing in glazes, with great textures and color reactions. It functions as one of the two fluxes used in ceramic glazes, so they are still alumino-silicate glasses, but the Alkaline Earth contributions dictate the specific crystal structures in matte glazes and the color reactions. That said, Strontium is not that popular in my field, but I like it a lot.

I love how Tom could 100% just check the maximum possible heat stress (whatever you call it) numbers online and know if porcelain is actually suitable for this use, but he just choose not

I love this channel (and E&F) because its like how we'd have to do science in a post apocalyptic settings without access to any good tools.

Feral science where one ghathers their wicked magic ingredients from the wild and uses abstract utensil to create magic rocks is my favourite genre

People come to this channel to think its a chemistry channel, but they couldnt be more wrong! Today i learned of geology of Madagascar, I learned of the wild habitats of australia's snakes, we went on an adventure to the outbacks to mine for the ancient reagent called Carbon, learned a lot about kitchen appliances, learned about pottery and its limits, as well as a life lesson to not frown when things dont go your way all the time. Tom, i think you can single handedly teach all high school subjects, and half of the college majors available from just one video!

When you were microwaving the powder and its just fracturing the pottery, all I could think of was the old youtube series "Is it a good idea to microwave this?" and that time they almost died with the Airbag.

I reckon all this backyard chemistry is useful for identifying deadly smells out and about. When theres a deadly refrigerant leak at the grocery store you can be the one that says "Hey I know that smell. We have about 4 minutes."

As a glass nerd, THANK YOU so much for mentioning strontium carbonate as a raw material for crt screen production. The strontium ions also prevented browning, i.e. the actual decoloration of the glass by the radiation ... 🤓

That's the smallest ball media I've ever seen used in a mill. 3-4x that size would work much better for you.

I love how you constantly oscillate between being an advanced chemist and acting like you have no idea what you're about to do or how you got here.

Fun Fact, the exact procedure of adding moisture to a mix of powders in a ball mill that you used on accident is used in fireworks to produce the granulated fireworks stars used in fireworks rockets and big fireworks effect charges.

I don’t understand basically any of the chemistry on this channel, but the way Tom explains it makes me feel like I do

The potassium contamination almost certainly came from your free reagent. The word “potassium” literally derived from “pot”+”ash”+”-ium”. Burning wood and then washing the charcoal with water is literally how we got the name for the element.

As a materials scientist I shed a small tear watching Tom smash up some nice looking crystals. But the processing steps, abuse of a kitchen microwave and brilliant red flame test more than made up for it. Nice work! I'm starting to think of what minerals are near me that you could get something interesting out of. And indeed there is; a nearby town has deposits of scheelite - a source of tungsten. Maybe that'll be a summer project.

Microwave based processes are an area of recent research in mineral processing. A friend did a PhD on using microwaves for the calcination and acid baking of spodumene (lithium-aluminium silicate). Microwave assisted grinding is a thing too - different minerals heat up differently on microwave irradiation and the different degrees of expansion lead to microfractures at grain boundaries, reducing the amount of energy needed for grinding and improving the degree of separation in downstream beneficiation processes.

As a geologist, I do enjoy ore extraction videos.

16:45 ah yes a chemist’s most trusty tool. A stick

Thanks for these diversions into a process. The Ire channel is tops. Knowing what you are capable of with proper equipment, but limiting yourself to K-Mart.... brilliant. Cheers on your PHD progress.

The level of skill Tom have and yet he decided to make it look like an old meth lab that have decided to go corporate and make useful reagents. Such a big fan. Glad to see a video from you again.

One niche use of strontium is as an additive in cast aluminium alloys, adding small amounts improves the grain structure.

This was my first video of yours I've watched and i really enjoyed it. I have no history in chemistry and all of this but am starting to learn about it. Thanks for the boost of inspiration !

I work as a material scientist and we do actually use scandium as an alloying element which helps reduce grain size

If my understanding of Australian chemistry is correct, the porcelain would have held together better if you said "she'll be right".

I really enjoyed how we went from cheap cracking ceramic and an old janky microwave to a beautiful fancy glassware setup. It's really cool seeing how you work through these problems

Truly the most hinged chemistry youtuber

"What crucible should we use?" Buys a tea set.this guynis awesome.

I love how when testing the temperature of your 150 degree crucible you went for the hand test before the thermometer to see if it was hot

you can do some cool microwave cyclization reactions with strontium salts

Also I was wracking my brain to figure out where I knew strontium because it wasn't fireworks for me. Then the filtered strontium carbonate started drying and I realized: STRONTIUM ALUMINATE is the best of the glow in the dark paint types.

"We're gonna pause it at two minutes, just to let it.... think about it." i love this method. the insinuation that sometimes the chemistry is a personality and you have to see if it will want to work with you or not

The potassium contamination might be because of you using firewood coal. Wood ashes are mostly potassium carbonate. Ideally you should have washed the charcoal with copious amounts of water first. Looks good otherwise, I had hoped to see you make some strontium nitrate though to confirm its typical red flame.

I’ve seen a lot of comments mentioning Strontium-90 here. I’m old enough to remember having my baby teeth collected for a study on fallout from above-ground nuclear testing. The half-life is 28.8 years, so there probably isn’t much left in my adult teeth. I love Tom’s videos because of the combination of good chemistry, solving non-textbook problems (e.g. starting with a mineral instead of refined powder from Sigma-Aldrich), and the variety of comments from other viewers. Plus, there is the excitement of always wondering whether the chemistry is going to go Yellow, or all the way to Tar!

I had to Google is Strontium a metal? A soft, silvery metal that burns in air and reacts with water. Metal + Microwave = Marvelous Idea.

NileRed: I bought a nuclear enrichment plant Explosions&Fire: let's see if an espresso cup works as a crucible

Actually scandium is not an useless element. Yes it's not very rare but it's very dispersed and doesn't form ores so its extraction is not straightforward. And it is useful in aluminum superalloys (hint: supersonic jet fighters are made of aluminum-scandium alloys). According to wikipedia, the world demand for scandium is about 50% higher than world production, making it quite expensive too.

The switch from a specialized ceramic in the paper to regular porcelain for you at ~ 18:00 reminds me of my basic electronics course in high school. A classmate of mine had read about this special ink that had been developed that you could draw on a copper blank, UV treat it, and then put it in the acid bath. Afterwards, the areas you drew on would be left intact. The kid that read about it brought it up to the teacher and asked if he could try it out with just regular sharpies and tossing them into the UV kiln in the woodshop just behind us, so we ran a full experiment, including a set of UV treated and untreated boards with the full gamut of sharpie sizes. Well, as it would turn out, you didn't need a special ink or even the UV treatment. Just a regular sharpie of any size above ultra fine works, so you can draw whatever you want on there and it's (somehow) protected from the acid bath.

I find it very wholesome that your father incorporated your work and content into his life enough to make a yellow joke. Even if it was a bit of a roast. Yellow has become a pretty big part of the community and how we express ourselves in our chemistry exploits (judging by the discord that is) and to see him express similarly feels like he's getting in on the fun too. ~Hi Explosions&Father~

"Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it." 😂

Honestly these refining sorts of videos are super underrated. There's so much disconnect between where we get all of our industrial chemicals from as a society or where precious elements really come from. As a mineral collector, smashing up that specimen kind of hurt my soul, it looks like some nice Madagascar stuff, though I'm happy you kept the nicer one! Worth it for the educational content though.

Lanthanum is used in lanthanated tungsten TIG electrodes and sputtering targets so not completely useless.

First step: Making Bismuth tea in an ultrasonic bath Second step: Crush nature’s art Third step: Painstakingly retrieving the crushed ore from the dirty bucket with a “plastic beaker” … Anyway thank you for this upload, splendid as always!

Don’t worry about the snakes, Tom. Australia isn’t known for poisonous things.

"The balls are not clean" Story of my life.

“I might get bitten by a snake, but yknow…that’s just something you deal with every day of your life” Everyone living outside of Australia: “No Tom…..no it really isn’t…”

> You're thinking "strontium, ah that's used in fireworks" Actually I was thinking back to the days of going into siege mode in my Naglfar.

Love the high tech fully scientific sample mixing/stirring apparatus aka "a stick"! Very Australian. Glad to see you're keeping it real :-)

You might have better results using unglazed porcelain (ie. terracotta flowerpot). The ceramic glazing will absorb a lot of microwaves, that you really want the carbon to absorb.

The emission spectrum of strontium is really pretty. It's three lines, one red, one orange, one yellow.

Props for listening to aphex twin

My favorite channel to listen to while I'm at work or to have on in the background while I make my RU-vid videos. Always informative, funny, and down-to-earth. Great work man, keep it up. (:

A tip for heating stuff -- if you don't have [or can't be arsed to go out and buy] fire bricks (the styrofoam-like insulating kind) or ceramic wool (not the glass/rock wool kind that melts at red heat), try a large microwave-safe container filled with clean white sand, and embed the crucible in that. Stoneware is better than porcelain for the crucible but it's probably going to crack all the same, so having sand fill to back up up will keep it together, while insulating it better than open air. Better than sand, consider perlite or vermiculite (gardening aisle). May want to crush them up a bit or pack tightly since they tend to be fairly coarse and loose. You definitely need to get it hot; alkaline earth sulfides are quite refractory. 1000C is yellow hot -- if it were that hot on the top it would illuminate the microwave interior! It would also take more power than the microwave can supply, so it needs to be well insulated. The powdered charge is rather self-insulating already, and it seems you did indeed get some reduction in the center! That probably accounts for most of the low yield. Upside: just keep cooking the filtered junk, all the carbon and sulfate is still in there! Maybe top up the carbon from time to time. Speaking of fire, can cook out the yellow from the product by roasting it at red heat, probably -- maybe put it on a steel sheet or can next time you have a bonfire or something. (Char the sheet before use, get a nice crisp oxide layer on it, don't want paint residue gooping it up!)

"everyone says strontium is used for fireworks for some reason" "my end goal for this project is to burn it to produce a colour i like"

X&F: **very Aussie** ball mill Closed Captions: bowl meal

I think the temperature cycling as you checked the progress is what did in your ceramics. If you had been able to just leave it cooking the ceramics might have fared better. Always awesome to see your experiments! 🙂

21:39 I've done stuff like this quite a bit before, trying to get barium carbonate. So I suggest putting an MDF board, or a silicone mat if you can. Their pretty common in the kitchen for baking, so I trust you'll be able to find them. If you use the MDF board, it'll get carbonised at the high temperatures, but your glass microwave base will survive. And for the crucible, if you want, aluminium oxide crucibles are pretty cheap online (and come with a lid most of the time). The ceramic doesn't survive because sometimes there's still a tiny bit of water left in there that boils in the heat. I'm amazed the coffee mug manage to survive so much

This is probably the best home chemistry channel. Usually others have reagents like t-butyllithium that are almost impossible for an amateur to acquire

Oi, this is Scandium slander. Scandium makes incredible alloys, particularly in low concentrations in aluminum. Incredibly useful, but the supply's so small and unreliable (it's only produced as a byproduct of other mining) that it mostly sees use in high-end sporting equipment. There's a few pure-play scandium mining projects that would dramatically increase supply, but they've been in Project Development Limbo for years and years. If Scandium was available in bulk on demand reliably at any kind of halfway sane price, we'd use it anywhere we currently use aluminum and could really do with better material properties (including but very much not limited to aerospace engineering)

2 questions: - Are you going to try to run the harder stuff that you thought had most of the actual strontium in it through any purification process? -Have you considered a sodastream for the carbonation step? (Great video btw!)

I believe Sr90 is used as a contrast compound in CT scans and other radioactive imaging techniques. Thanks for another video Tom my ADHD was in need of some sketchy science

You must be at peak PhD procrastination... two videos in a week xD

I love hearing these old Aphex tracks from the huge track dump again, and you've made good use of them. I remember what is now like 7 or some years ago when they were first released, blasting these tracks on repeat out of my brand new studio speakers at my parents house lol

" 'Microwave safe', we'll be testing that to the limit" 😂

Strontium aluminate is used in glow-in-the-dark 3D printer filament :)

you put your hotplate over the gas burner you can reach 900. all you need to do then is stack another hotplate and lower the heat on it to 150c.

Tom, you do realise using nice crystals like that makes Geologists everywhere cry inside

I’m so happy I found this second channel, I was about to run out of Explosions & Fire videos and then I see there’s ALL THESE here and they’re even more in depth??? It’s like Christmas up in here

Geology student and general mineral enthusiast here, good choice not to use that other sample, it is indeed quite a nice specimen! Also, FYI: if you ever need to crush rocks in the future (like you did with the hammer), wrap it in some cloth or a towel- that'll prevent the shards from going absolutely everywhere. I'd still recommend a face shield just in case, though.

You know, if you're ever out of milk but need calcium -> strontium-90 is an ideal replacement (your body thinks so already)

Burning a mattress, definitely covering up a crime scene. I’m telling the resident danger noodle to be on the lookout.

So great to see you back. Love your videos. I know RU-vid is tough and I wish it wasn't that way. Finding your videos has definitely reinvigorated my love of chemistry and taught me a lot. I'm on a HazMat team and I actually have used information from your videos in the field. If only I had paid more attention in Orgo 2 in college...

OMG, a new chemistry video! 20 seconds in, and I am already asking myself how long it will take to turn yellow 😁 Edit: 26 minutes! And only a little bit yellow! Nice 😊

1:00 Strontium in automotive industry is added in traces to Aluminum as defects marker, to help in Xray defect inspection stage. As other user here said, it also improves the alloy a bit.

Honestly I don't know anything about chemistry or most of what is going on in your videos, but the reactions and commentary during the recording is so comical that it is fairly addictive. Thanks for being awesome and keep doing whatever voodoo it is that you are doing :)

I have always admired the excellent BGM choices on this channel. Even when done in jokes, I appreciate the original efforts!

Tom, I've learnt way more from your channel than all of the 4 years of high school science I did in the 90s. I have no interest in chemistry whatsoever and yet for some reason I've watched all of your videos.

I am just entertained by this mans passion. At this point I no longer think too hard about what he is doing like I used to...

6:22 "industrial process" hmm today I will hit rock in bucket with hammer science is so goddamn hilarious

Tom, you made us wait until 11:28 for some cool music! I thought you'd grown out of it or something silly like that. Awesome to see you're back with E&I!👍

I know that there are induction crucibles specifically made for home microwaves. They are usually advertised for making glass beads at home. Seems like they get over 1000°c without much trouble, or enough to melt sand. I've been meaning to pick one up from the usual sources.

Woohoo. I am going to love this one! Pity I have to work right now. Tack it on to the watch list. Thanks Tom - you are an inspiration.

The term "mousee shitification" made me choke on my water from how funny it was

I miss the times when I did microwave extractions. You pour in a sample, some HF and other chemicals, shake, bake, neutralise and a crystal clear liquid is ready to run on your ICP.

Love how the camera quality has moved to 4k but the equiptment is still the same its brilliant. Now we can see all your mistakes in 4k

The primitive technology channel of a dystopian future, great project !

The technical term for making of that mouse poop is granulation, which funnily enough I studied during my doctorate. It would indeed be due to moisture, probably inside the chunks of carbon.

This is so fantastic. It's so much fun to watch you do this stuff.

I am so very delighted to see more extractions and ire, thanks for the stront update.

16:02 Mate is afraid of a bit of H2S and completely forgot about those 4 molecules of CO being created for every molecule of SrSO4 lol

I enjoy this so much! Amazing content, best wishes to you and your future projects! 🌻

Watching this channel has made the other channel's videos much more nerve racking. I appreciate your content, all

I'm really impressed how long the microwave's glass turntable held on before cracking. The pretty red flame was quite gratifying to see at the end.

Some aphex twin and (slightly) yellow chem in the australian sun makes me kinda nostalgic. Great to see you back making videos, thankful as always.

Great video. I always look forward to your posts.

Searching for Carbon on the ground like that is pure survival game logic.