Your persistence is admirable, I would totally have given up after the glassware disaster! Thanks for showing us what didn't work and always educating rather than entertaining.
it may have been driving you insane but ill tell ya this, its convinced me to subscribe. thank you for sharing your failures, theyre just as important as successes, the road of success is paved with failure.
Thank you for making this video even though the results weren't what any of us wanted to see.. And man could we feel your pain at the end! Hopefully the next project will be much more successful and one day in the distant future when the scars and pain of this one has healed, some good can come from it and maybe the hidden lithium will be found.
To your question: Was it worth it? I think it was worth it because you learn a lot from failures. This is how you become a professional. Not just that but imagine now how people following your channel can give you good feedback to further strengthen your knowledge.
+Scrap Science There´s a way that should probably give much better results: you could try the precipitate most of the metal ions as insoluble sulfides leaving the lithium behind in the leftover solution. I recommend doing the metal sulfides precipitation with the solution constantly at a neutral or mildly alkaline Ph. Maybe sodium or potassium polysulfides could do the trick (they can be made by heating sodium or potassium hydroxide solution and dissolving sulfur in it).
classic, the moping of the desk 🤪. (Better known as a bench extraction) To quote my son the last time I cought fire "do it again, the camera wasn't ready"
You may want to try oxalic acid at some point. I have had success in isolating lithium oxalate from other metal salts. It's been a long while since I've recycled my own lithium from batteries, but I remember getting all the cobalt out using aluminum metal in a HCl solution containing cobalt. The lithium oxalate crystals burn red.
Interesting! I'll have to keep that in mind if I try this again. Does the oxalate work to selectively precipitate lithium? I assume you'll always need to remove the transition metals first.
@@ScrapScience I remember removing the dissolved copper first with iron, then cobalt with aluminum. I was able to use a magnet on the black cobalt precip to mechanically remove it. I don't recall ever attempting to remove manganese in my solution, but there might not have been much since I filtered off all the black sludge as my first step. I used increments of oxalic acid to get ferrous oxalate to precip out if I recall correctly, then reached a point that no more yellow precip formed. I think it was at this point that I began working on the lithium oxalate which formed elongated / needle like crystals. I'll admit that by this time, I didn't have a great idea of how much oxalic acid and oxalate salts were solution and it's really an experiment I need to dive into again. I just thought it was worth mentioning. I know there was a step or two that I took to remove aluminum from the solution, but I honestly can't remember exactly when, but was obviously after the cobalt. Also good to note is that I used a LiPo cell and not Li-Ion as my lithium source.
You can wash manganese dioxide out of equipment with dilute hydrochloric acid (MnO2 + 4 HCl → MnCl2 + 2 H2O + Cl2) but note that the reaction releases chlorine gas so cleaning outdoors or a well ventilated area is highly recommended.
I understand how you feel about getting tired of stuff I had a whole bunch of laboratory stuff and chemicals but my ex and I we got broke up and I lost all my stuff I even had a forge I had all kinds of things you wouldn't believe but now I'm trying to rebuild them so I know how frustrated you get in I had lithium metal I have potassium metal and sodium metal at all kinds of stuff like Square in electrolysis E I had all kinds of glassware for 2440 2940 or however however it is whatever 14 something else I'm telling you I have been there I know what you're talkin about I need help try to rebuild this is really the only thing that really makes me happiest thinking of chemistry like organic and inorganic I think of it as physical chemistry
Bro you deserve to be somewhere your worth is. You are not only genius but a hard worker as well. Thank u for the videos. Wish u to have a happy and successful life.
I have a question: at what pH-value do u give the (ammonium) peroxidisulfate to precipitate the manganese? And how many grams do one need per L solution? I would like to try this step myself...
I was loosely following this paper: doi.org/10.1039/D0RA09297E It appears as though the exact pH is not critical, as long as it's at least a bit acidic. I don't remember exactly what pH this solution was at. From memory, I used a bit over 75 g of the persulfate to precipitate the manganese from this quantity of material, but this is likely to be a big excess.
6:30 you can't produce manganese dioxide with manganese sulfate and ammonium sulfate! So what did you exactly add to the solution with manganese sulfate? Maybe Ammonium dioxide?
Lithium has a pretty weak flame colour compared to most other ions. In all of the other solutions, there are too many other cations to make the lithium flame visible.
The samurai is unconcerned with the destination, he is only concerned with the path. Improvise, adapt, overcome. I think that you Harry, are an excellent example of this USMC ethic. Strong work my friend. Always look forward to your posts.
Really informative, I really like the way, you passionately explain the whole process, It motivated me to follow and see the results even if the results aren’t that satisfying but it worth to save the experience. Thanks🙏🏻
you have a voice similar to actor Tom Cruise (as Ethan), you should have predicted the amount of metal and the amount of acid and base added and write the equation . your video is very good, and in a Li-ion battery with LiCoO2, the Li ions diffuse into the graphite and they stay in the graphite
When possible, do a small amount in a test tube, before committing the whole volume to an uncertain procedure. Also, do you have the capabilities to do qualitative/quantitative analysis?
Use something else than a latex tube for vacuum. Those always collapse under vacuum like seems to have happened in your first filtration too. Something with stiffer and preferably thicker walls work so much better. Even simple pvc tube or whatever is better, latex is one of the worst and easiest to collapse. I think those thin wall bottles are very prone to collapsing. For vacuum you should use thick wall filter bottle or round bottle. Some chinese sellers seem to just add a side connection to normal erlenmayer bottle and you should never use normal erlenmayers under vacuum due to the risk of breaking. Even with good quality erlenmayers it is a recipe for an accident.
I think there is something important to take away from this which does make it worthwhile, and that is the order in which you extract the metals. It would seem that the manganese and cobalt were the main problems and extracting them first might make extracting any lithium not only easier but even possible.
Wow. It's insane how much amount of effort that went to try and recover this precious metal. I wish there were more easier way than this. It sure was one heck of a learning experience...at least for me. Thank you so much for sharing. I am subscribing to your channel.
This is the reason why electric vehicles are such a environmetal disaster, there simply is no viable recycling process avaible yet for Li-ion batteries other than burning them and basically landfill the ashes.
Aunque no funcionó te agradezco por tu video, me ahorro bastante tiempo, creó que tengo la solución, probaré y publicaré si funciona, mil gracias de antemano.
It would probably work to use ammonia here, but I wanted to avoid any issues of ammonia complexes redissolving, and I also wanted to avoid adding any more ions to the solution when I didn't need to.
@@ScrapScience U are maybe right with the redissolving with ammonia. This can be solved with electrolysis of the rest heavy metals afterwards, which also destroys the ammonia. The classical way with LIBs is solving with H2SO4 and then precipitating with sodium carbonate first the nickel and cobalt and manganese together and then afterwards give more carbonate until the Li2CO3 preciptates at pH 13-14. And again, better use carbonate powder.
Would it be easier to get metallic lithium out of disposable lithium batteries, I know they contain it in metallic form idk how safe or practicle it would be to remove it from some cheap surefire cr123a batteries.
That’s very true. It’s much more convenient to get metallic lithium from non-rechargeable lithium batteries. However, this method is ridiculously expensive for the amount of lithium you get, so I was trying to develop a different (more affordable) lithium extraction.
Im a chem noob but would it be possible to extract lithium hydroxide (I think) from the majority of the other elements with water at the beginning then clean and precipitate similar to doing the same with lithium foil from batterys? And could there be something with the lithium reacting with the carbon from the electrode making lithium carbonate or something like water and or oxygen in the reactions that prevent extraction because its a hydroxide, oxide or carbonate at the wrong point in the extraction. Guessing its not a problem when using acids even when diluted? Or im just brain farting, seems your other viewers and you know much more than I but hopefully my farts help us both if not helps me learn without doing experiments that would end horribly 😂. Keen to see what you do next. Definitely subscribing!
If I'm understanding you correctly, that was kind of the idea in the last episode, where we tried leaching out the lithium from the incinerated batteries by adding water. While I thought it was a good idea, it didn't work. As for the form of the lithium salt, a hydroxide, oxide, and carbonate should all react in pretty much exactly the same way upon the addition of acid (as you've noted), so its unlikely that that's where our problems lie. Regardless, your guess is as good as mine when trying to figure out where this extraction went wrong.
I know I'm kind of late but remember the paper from 1921 that you followed to make potassium permanganate? They used acetic acid and hydrogen peroxide to dissolve manganese dioxide so you could try using that to clean the beaker.
Interesting. I've just been using concentrated hydrochloric acid lately, but that generates a small amount of chlorine when it dissolves the manganese dioxide. This is probably a better method, thanks!
RIP vacuum flask.. looks like they didn't heat treat it properly, i have a glass asperator that i use for vacuum filtering and it pulls a really good vacuum and all my glassware is chinese and I've never had any issues yet luckily.. It's hard to go past chinese glassware with the cost difference, all my stuff would have probably cost me 10k if it wasn't chinese
Aspirator pumps are super convenient! I was actually using one for the filtration at 17:50, but I think I might need a faster water pump for it. And yeah, don't get me wrong, glassware from China is almost always extremely high quality for the price. This one was just a bad egg it seems.
As much as that would be nice, sending samples for this type of analysis is difficult and expensive for the individual who doesn't run a real lab. I'm afraid it's just not cost effective from my position.
A mixture of the hot solution and the vacuum I had on it was what did it I assume. I honestly can't remember whether it was advertised as borosilicate, but I doubt it given the results.
Yep! It's a pretty expensive way to get it, but much easier. Might be the better way to go about it in the future. At least we'll eventually get some cobalt from these batteries though.
Don't buy Chinese glassware first time I started refining gold and silver I bought some really cheap glassware and unsurprisingly it broke and I'm lost part of my solution I could not enough with paper towels after that I started buying good glassware
