Can You Turn Wildflowers into Rubber?

this video is sponsored by Mel chemistry an awesome monthly subscription with fun educational and safe experiments for kids and parents to do at home it comes with everything you need to get started plus ninety experiments on over 30 chemistry topics delivered right to your door click the link below to get 25% off your first month and make sure you stay tuned for a chance to win a free subscription at the end of the video one compound I've been aiming to make for a while now is rubber and I attempted to grow some specially bred Russian dandelions the previous year in the hope that I could extract some other latex unfortunately it seems the growing specific dandelions when you want them is harder than you think nothing really grew but then I got a suggestion from a reddit user fart gas for my subreddit about using a wild flower that's been explored as a source of latex for rubber goldenrod the grows abundantly naturally here in Minnesota and once you learn what it looks like you realize it grows everywhere so I harvested a small field of it to see what I could extract [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] rubber is a Palmer and earlier this year I explored another polymer poly lactic acid or PLA we already have a big ball of polymer we'll call it a polymer with the help of the Center for Sustainable polymers at the University of Minnesota so I recruited a few the guys I met there to test run and help me with the creation of this polymer daeum and david luce that's how you get a loose professionally alright so today we are going to be making rubber from scratch a natural rubber is usually extracted from rubber trees a rubber tree produces a lot of rubber and it's really easy to tap and you can get out the rubber kind of like SAP out of a maple tree but unfortunately rubber trees don't grow most place in North America and certainly nowhere in the US early in the 20th century the US government put a lot of effort behind trying to identify another plant that also contains latex rubber that grows in this sort of climate a lot of plants have latex rubber so I'm going to go ahead and nip this rubber plant stem here near the leaf and we're gonna see this substance come out you'll get a white liquid coming out and that's actually latex rubber it turns out that after a lot of study by people including Thomas Edison one of the plants that grows readily in North America has the highest percentage of rubber is actually a goldenrod so today and we are going to take these and extract the rubber decent read pretty good in order to extract the rubber we can't really do it in this form we have to grind them up into really small bits and then we're going to go ahead and put the ground-up leaves into an extraction apparatus which is going to extract a lot of the compounds we don't want and then we'll move on to a second step where we can extract the actual rubber thing up for you [Music] okay so now we have our ground plant matter and now we're going to need to extract all the compounds we don't want which are fats oil is in chlorophyll so we're gonna stuff some cotton in this little neck and to do that we're gonna put the plant matter in this bulb here that's gonna be our extraction vessel and then down here in this flask we're gonna have a reservoir of acetone this is all gonna go on a hot plate so the acetone is gonna boil up condense over the plant matter go down extract compounds contaminated acetone is gonna fall back down and then we're gonna have fresh acetone coming up boiling over and it's gonna continuously extract from the plant matter yesterday we took our plant matter and we extracted all the compounds that we didn't want with acetone and then once it's done we get this nice ground powder which actually smells very little like plant matter and if you actually take a little bit of this and soak it in acetone you can see that there's no color change the acetone stays clear which is a good sign so the last step is gonna be pulling out what we want which is the latex rubber technically known as poly isoprene that's a molecule that's really soluble in toluene so what we're gonna do is take this plant matter load it up into our flask put it into some toluene and boil it then we'll filter off the plant matter and we should be left with the latex rubber inside of the toluene [Music] next i'll be going through the process myself put out a large scale but first a message from our sponsor today i'm going to be trying the rocket fuel experiment for mill chemistry first I'm going to prepare a mixture of an oxidant calcium nitrate tetrahydrate and a fuel potassium hexa cyano Ferrier trihydrate together since the crystals of both compounds contain some water molecules I'm going to keep the mixture to make this water evaporate now I'm going to extinguish the candle since the mixture is completely dry now I'm going to ignite the mixture stay tuned for your chance to win a free subscription at the end of the video i was like 'i'm and dave we're able to produce a test batch make a little bit of rubber proving there is latex in them and it is possible to actually make some rubber so this should work now we're gonna scale it up try and extract the latex from all the leaves i collected and hopefully make a ball maybe we'll see how big it is first to smush all the dry leaves i clicked then I had Anneliese grind them even finer [Music] rigged up this guy with two paint cans punched a bunch of holes in the bottom show some rods in there so inside the bottom the solvent will be put here must be put onto a hot plate and then they'll turn into a gas and go through the holes of a glass bowl of ice water it will cool it and cause it to condense and drip back down and recollect at the bottom and I'll just cycle over and over and over again and it's gonna be two processes so we'll start with an acetone remove all the solid goals they want to get out of the way and then we'll move on to the toluene which will extract just latex and that will give us the rubber and make a nice ball [Applause] [Music] [Music] every rain for a few hours it's time to test the batch and see if everything is removed after finally turning out relatively clear move the first batch of leaves to the second extraction it's clear that's a bad sign the paint can't set up didn't seem to work as well for the second phase the extraction so I returned to them that that Geum and David used with just glassware to allows me to see whether it's working or not this will take quite a few more batches and slow everything down [Music] after several hours strained and reload with the next batch then evaporate off the towel II leave just a latex rubber behind [Music] now back to qiyam and david for some help with the final step of the rubber production did I mention Goodyear and let go a little historical briefly I love historical polymer chemistry once we use the toluene which is our nonpolar solvent to extract the poly isoprene what we have are a lot of these small poly isoprene polymer chains dissolved in this nonpolar solvent so once we get rid of the excess toluene what we're left with is a concentrated mix of these poly isoprene chains now these chains are pretty short and so they actually tend to flow there a little bit liquidy they get pretty solid at room temperature but they're sticky and they tend to droop so if you rolled it up into a ball it would actually creep over times what we call it where it would flow down into a little puddle so in order to get this rubber to hold its shape we need to change its structure in some way or change the chemistry of it in some way Charles Goodyear actually did this allegedly by accident so what he did was he took some natural rubber he put it into a pot and then he added some sulphur which you can get from sulfur or which Andy has gotten in a previous video it blew up and what Charles Goodyear did he see forgot this mixture while I was heating and he came back to a hardened rubber that did not droop that process later became known as vulcanization and led to a bunch of useful rubber materials and so what we've made is this mold and so we have these two half spheres and we're gonna do we're gonna load them up with the rubber and what we're gonna do is crimp it all together with some holes in the top to relieve any pressure and we're gonna heat it up with the sulfur in there and it's gonna vulcanized into a bouncy ball what could possibly go wrong absolutely nothing now to attempt the vulcanization myself and hopefully mold it better than my previous attempts and molding PLA got about 30 grams start with a little bit over kilo of leaves so the yield not super high around 3% I believe this kind of water was expected black gooey mess they're gonna vulcanize it by mixing in some sulfur put it into the mold and then bake it to turn into vulcanized rubber they don't give it a balance I just do this like cold stone exactly should we go to cold stone see if they love us make some rubber shake it again yep stick it back in [Music] all right so now have a completed rubber ball made from goldenrod leaves and it took a few attempts at baking it to finally get hot enough to finally vulcanize into something solid it ended up like swelling bit of an air pocket in the middle that got the full shape of the ball but it's hollow on the inside just probably gonna affect his bounciness I took some of the leftover resin and use that to patch in some of the cracks and holes in it so it's pretty solid now now it's time for the real test drop it from some height and see how well it bounces [Music] might not be up to commercial grade quality but it definitely bounce it's definitely a rubber thanks again to Mel science for sponsoring this video here are the three winners from our previous quiz to enter to win just answer the question in the comments so calcium nitrate is flammable in this experiment it is not flammable on its own in what product is calcium nitrate most commonly used put your answers in the comments below for a chance to win a free six month subscription to Mel chemistry if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you enjoy these series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching

Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 176,476

Rating: 4.8755774 out of 5

Keywords: HTME, DIY, Fun, Smart, Learn, Teach, Maker, History, Science, Innovator, Education, Educational, School, Invention, Agriculture, Textiles, Industry, Technology, latex, rubber, goldenrod, wildflower, natural latex, rubber ball, bouncy ball, rubber tree, rainforest, temperate, thomas edison, edison, tires, ball, chemistry, solvent, experimental science, bouncy, polymer

Id: VqgH5zkKTKc

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/mrjacank]

Now that you've made a rubber could you make a baseball? I think you've made all the parts separately and with the post season approaching it would be timely content.

Love the videos keep it up

[u/Judetheboss]

Awsome video my favourite yet

[u/ExileVirtigo]

Super cool!

[u/Real_Carl_Ramirez]

Thanks for following through with my suggestion! (P.S. I was u/Fart_Gas)