Barium - Periodic Table of Videos

so here we have a sample of barium so berium is going towards the bottom of the the group two or alkaline metals so this is a rod of barium we've got in here okay so what I'm going to do I'm going to hopefully if I can get the top off it's really hard I've got four pairs of gloves on here um so it's all quite hard everything's very very difficult to move I'm have to put it down for a second barium is a heavy element I believe that this is a sort of beum or and it's really heavy piece of mineral much heavier than you might expect seeing its size and um where'd you go that I found this just lying around when on a walk somewhere I think it may be be him sulfate but I'm not a mineralist so I may be completely wrong but it's a nice piece and I have it as an ornament in my office I'm hoping it'll come out aha there we go so that's the end of our Rod of barium so what we can do um it's barium is quite soft so we should be able to file a little bit of berium off and we do that so we have some berium starting material so we can react it with things and make berium compounds there it is so this is 100 G Rod of barium I don't think we've used too much so they're probably is close on 100 G there because barium is a heavy element it has quite an important medical use because heavy elements scatter x-rays so that if you shine x-rays on a solution or suspension of barium it looks black and because the x-rays don't go through so if you want to take pictures of the soft part of somebody's body it's easy to take pictures of their bones but if you want to look at their gut or their um throat or their intestin SS they don't show up on x-rays so you feed them what is called a Barian meal if they take it through their mouth or a barium enema if they take it through the other end and you pump in quite large quantities of some barium salt and then when you X-ray them the part that's filled up or just has been coated with it looks black or white if you look at the X-ray and negative which people quite often do so it's very useful for a fairly straightforward x-ray Imaging of people's bodies have you ever had a Barian meal fortunately not it's not meant to taste very nice I think they put peppermint or something into it to pretend that you're enjoying it but drinking a large quantity of berium I think is not enormous fun and people use berium because it's really non-toxic if you took that amount of lead or Mercury you might get a better a picture but you'd be dead so what we should be able to do hopefully cuz this barium is soft we should be able to file a little bit of the barium onto this foil this is what I'm hoping to do let's see if I'm a girly girl now oh I can see little bits coming off actually they're very very small so they're very that was a bigger bit so I'll show you this again in a in a minute but you can see how we're kind of starting to clean off the surface so we're kind of taking that tarnish layer off many elements suddenly become fashionable and in the 1980s late 1980s barium became fashionable as one of the components of the so-called high temperature superconductors a superconductor is a material which has zero electrical resistance and people discovered that a compounds of barium yum and copper barium yum cuprate and related comp compounds when they were cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature 77° absolute minus 196 CRA became superconductors o apart from shaky hands so I've got hopefully some very sort of fine barium turnings now so you can see that okay we have a little bit of tarnish in there but also they we have you know quite a shiny Lester as well on some of the bits so there's my berium nitrate and again I'm going to add some of my combustion mixture now we're using the energy of that combustion of the sugar to excite the barium so that we can observe its emission spectrum or the flame test color again pour it out onto a heat proof mat so again so this time again we saw the same exciting chemical reaction we saw that same exothermic reaction lots of CO2 lots of steam again but this time the flame was colored green and this is the the characteristic apple green which is associated with barium salts so much more exciting flame test all the elements in this group group two have fluorides that are insoluble and they're very nice materials they look like glass and you can put them in water and they don't dissolve and this is extremely useful for technique called infrared spectroscopy where you're putting essentially heat Rays through some sort of liquid to measure the Spectrum how the light is absorbed and especially if you're using water or something that's wet salts of calcium fluoride barium fluoride are really good for making the windows here's quite a large window you can see my eye through it this one unfortunately is cracked so it's no use anymore this is calcium fluoride and calcium fluoride is much cheaper than barium fluoride so if you can get away with it you use calcium fluoride for an experiment the problem is that calcium ions are quite light and the fluoride and calcium ions vibrate in the crystal through thermal energy and these vibrations absorb infrared light barium is much heavier so barium fluoride vibrates more slowly and so it absorbs much longer wavelength light so in a particular experiment if you need to get that region of a spectrum you have to go for barium fluoride instead I tried calling one of my colleagues in the other office see if you had a piece of barium fluoride a barium fluoride window can't find it so you can see calcium fluoride Barum fluoride will look exactly the same but honestly makes us say this is not baring fluoride so we have this one Big Blob and we have the finally divided barium as well okay we're going to try and put that in water and and see how it reacts okay so what's happening is we are seeing um the barium reacting with the water I think our Big Blob is still going actually so the barium is reacting with the water what we're doing is producing hydrogen gas and what I think is probably berium hydroxide um so that's what's precipitating out of solution

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 559,526

Keywords: barium, periodic, table, of, videos, x-ray

Id: 9srJdQU3NOo

Length: 7min 50sec (470 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2011