Making Very Shitty Silica Gel From Sand (and making disodium silicate) 

I liked your approach of just pouring HCl over not knowing the amount of the other compound. It's just pragmatic. No need to break your head over things like that.

Silicic acid, Na silicate... Nice. You are now ready for some DIY catalyst deposition, for some column chromatography packing... or for colorful chemical garden...

Might do some Grignards this week after finding easy ways to dry the reagents.

hhahaha well at least you tried. nicely done. if you ever want to revisit this in the future: 1) in a teflon container, heat both glass shards and NaOH with water. (nurd rage used a glass container but idk about that one chief) 2) the resulting solution should be added to 300 mL or so of waterwater at a rate of approx 1-10 mL /min, with an addition funnel and strong stirring 3) at the same time, add HCl and try to keep pH at 8-10 - this requires some trial and error - during the whole addition. I used sulfuric acid, 96%, and my ratio was approx 1 mL sulfuric acid to 12 mL of Waterglass (composition approx 30% w/w SiO2, 8% Na2O) 4) at the end of the addition of all silica gel, that is, however much you want to add, neutralize to pH 4 keep in mind that hot pH will be further away from neutral than cold pH! (if the solution is basic, it will be more basic, if it's acidic, it will be more acidic)

In water it works even better! Try using silica based cat litter

Nice one

Huh, reminds me a bit at NURDRAGE 😭 I miss him 💙❤️💙 I hope he's well! Nice way to get Silica....😎

@0:49 - plus you really don't want molten NaOH in contact with Al

If I'd done it, I think I'd started with crushed glass. You could have removed more iron or manganese, easily. You can also get a solution of silicate ("water glass"), and just done the precipitation. Making a silica for chromatography or drying, is more of a challenge. You can also isolate silica from many different plants and herbs. Just a comment. You have done a good demonstration by making the glass, from sand and soda! I loved to seed a solution of the silicate with crystals of various transition metal salts. It looks like growing seaweeds with many different colours !

If you want to, try to heat up titanium metal and put it in liquid chlorine The reaction is beautiful

I say make pure chromatography silica and run a column.

Add more naoh, get it to melt

What is the point of making SiO2 from NaSiO3, when you used SiO2 to make the NaSiO3?

cool

i thought they just let crushed quartz grind until a certain size in a roller