Making Lithium Metal 

Interesting! That explains a lot. When I attempted to melt the lithium into one piece, I actually did it under a film of molten LiCl due to that very ability of LiCl to 'wet' the surface of the lithium and protect it. The reason it failed was because the lithium bead stuck to the stainless steel spoon I was using to melt it, and I couldn't get it out. If I do it again, I'll probably try to melt it in something different...

Correct. Using the crucible as the cathode would protect it, but (from my experience in similar experiments) there are a couple of issues with doing this: 1) I've found that molten lithium sticks to stainles steel very strongly (similar to how water wets glass), which would make the metal very difficult to extract from the cell. In fact, I ran into this issue a couple of times in this experiment, where the lithium drops stuck to the cell wall, spread out over the surface, and became virtually unrecoverable. 2) Even if we can separate the lithium from the crucible, setups using the crucible as the cathode tend to generate the metallic product (in this case, lithium) all over the place, mainly in the forms of tiny beads that are difficult to coalesce. The ease of collecting a single bead of lithium on a small wire cathode outweighs the benefit of corrosion protection in my opinion.

@@ScrapScience that makes sense, thanks!

Hmmm... I like it. I'll add it to the list of video ideas. I'll also have to get some magnets I suppose.

Yep, the battery extraction technique is rather annoying in my opinion (though it does definitely give you more lithium, to be fair). Having homemade lithium is way cooler too.

I have a feeling it's not going to be shiny and new for long haha. I can already see a bit of rust forming from having it so close to a chlorine-generating reaction... I think I'll have to take better care of it in the future. And yes, it would have been nice to make our lithium from the batteries themselves, but I guess it wasn't meant to be.

I agree. Removing lithium from the melt increases the melting point of the eutectic. In this particular experiment, removing less than a gram of lithium really wouldn't have changed much, but it is certainly something to consider for longer runs.

This is just plain elemental lithium, a mixture of lithium-6 and lithium-7. The separation of the isotopes is a significant undertaking, and is (was) done industrially by the use of something called the COLEX process. Deuterium is separated by the Girdler-sulfide process.

It might be possible, but I’ve never been able to get the pieces to bond properly just by squishing them together. I assume surface oxidation prevents it from working nicely. Even doing it under oil doesn’t seem to allow it.

Woah! High praise from the king of the Mouth Pipetters himself. Glad you enjoyed!

You can always find my email on my channel page. Though be warned, I tend to only check it every few months.

I don't really know what you're asking here. Are you talking about the challenges I faced personally when doing this, or the general difficulties involved in making the metal?

A few reasons: 1) I found that molten lithium sticks to stainless steel very strongly, which would make it very difficult to remove from the reaction. 2) Even if it were easy to sepatate the lithium from the stainless steel, using the crucible as the cathode tends to make our metallic product in the form of tiny beads that are difficult to coalesce. It's much easier to collect from a small wire. 3) Molten salts are extremely conductive, and having high surface area electrodes is unneccesary for maintaining a high current in most cases.

Hmm, yeah that makes sense. My camera doesn’t have good zoom capabilities and I don’t really like to get it too close to the melt. I’ll see if I can sort something out before the next video on molten salt reactions.

Great to see you here! I've been a big fan of your videos for a while.

@@ScrapScience thank you so much! Always a pleasure meeting new talented individuals! You've got yourself a new sub!

Since we determined that graphite degrades extremely slowly when used as an anode in a molten chloride salt, yes. Provided it's conductive enough, using a clay/graphite crucible would likely make an excellent choice as the anode connection. In fact, I recently used this technique (successfully) for another reactive metal extraction, though it might be a while before I'm able to edit and upload the video.

@@ScrapScience Thank you for the quick response.

Plenty of Ebay sellers are happy to sell lithium chloride. That's where I got mine.

@@ScrapScience Thanks for the reply. I have tried looking on ebay before but I haven't found any vendor that would ship to Spain. Have just been looking into how to make it at home but it looks like a lengthy process and the fact that you didn't manage to make it work is not encouraging :

In a general sense, I'd say yes, but from a scientific perspective, I think it's more complicated. 'Heavy' and 'dense' are obviously two completely different concepts, and I would think that 'light' is more appropriate as the opposite of 'heavy', at least from the way people often use the word. If that's the case, having 'light' be the opposite of both things is a weird way for scientific language to work, and maybe there should be another word that exclusively refers to 'low-density' and not 'low-mass'? I don't really know what I'm talking about here.

Why?

@@ScrapScience *No nasty Chlorine fumes AND no forming of CHLORATES which took half of your lithium in solution. You got some Lithium BUT also made a new salt called Lithium Chlorate which dissolves lithium metal when in molten state. It also has a very low melting temperature and sucks water from air (Hydroscopic).*

Buy why would chlorate form in the first place? Where's the oxygen coming from in this reaction you're proposing? Even if we were making chlorate, I would have thought we were at temperatures which would decompose the chlorate back into chloride anyway. Additionally, how do you suggest dealing with the significantly higher melting point of lithium carbonate?

@@ScrapScience Oxidation of Chlorine at surface interface layer due to lack of lithium ions. Called a "balancing reaction"

I'm still very much struggling to see where the oxygen is coming from. Do you have any literature about this reaction you can point me towards? A 'balancing reaction' is something I've never heard of, and doesn't yield any results when I search for it.

Interesting. I'll give it a go at some point. I'd definitely prefer a single lump of lithium over the tiny pellets.

In theory, yes, it can be done. Strontium chloride also forms a eutectic system with potassium chloride, and apparently electrolyses in much the same way we've observed for lithium. I'll very likely be doing a video on this as part of the series, but it might be a while away.

chlorinated water

making carbides, with electrolysis

In hindsight, I don't think the cell ever actually stopped producing lithium. It's likely that I was just seeing reduced current draw from moving the electrodes around. In the second test, I didn't observe any decrease in lithium production. Either way, we were nowhere near depleting the lithium from the melt. Even at 100% current efficiency, we could only have extracted a maximum of 20% of all the lithium from the salt.

@@ScrapScience Thank you :)

We'll eventually get around to trying it. Potassium extraction by this method is very, very difficult, due to the high solubility of potassium in the molten KOH. There might be a couple of workarounds though...

@@ScrapScience I once did it with naoh and wanted to try koh

We didn't run the cell long enough to significantly deplete the lithium ions from the melt.

To be honest, I'm not sure of the exact type of filter. I just grabbed the one that said 'RATED FOR CHLORINE' on the side. As far as I remember, it definitely included the B type filter though, yes.

@@ScrapScience Well good luck :) Even though I have all the filters I need I still like to do controlled breathing techniques and walk away if I don't have to be around acid gases