Getting Manganese Dioxide, Zinc and Carbon from Batteries

manganese dioxide is a blackish or brown solid with several different uses it is commonly used in organic chemistry as something known as an oxidant and it can also be used as a pigment however the main use of manganese dioxide is actually in dry cell batteries it's called a dry cell battery because it doesn't have any liquid in it and instead it uses a paste anyway that's not too important but one of the most common versions of these dry cell batteries is known as the zinc-carbon battery this battery compared to others is extremely cheap to produce and this is the type of battery that you're most commonly find in things like dollar stores I'm not really going to get into the details about how these batteries work but basically they're called zinc carbon batteries but they contain a lot of manganese dioxide the metal can of the battery is made out of zinc there's a carbon rod in the center and in between the can and the rod is manganese dioxide maybe in the future we'll do a video on how batteries work but for now that's out of the scope of this one anyway these batteries are a very easy source of manganese dioxide a carbon electrode and zinc metal my main target is the manganese dioxide itself but I'm also going to keep the zinc and the carbon just in case I need it in the future my goal is seize the manganese dioxide in another over-the-counter synthesis of bromine by heating a mixture of manganese dioxide sodium bromide and sulfuric acid we can generate bromine I've already carried this out and it turned out to be an extremely dirty process and the first method that I posted is a lot better but I still thought it was interesting to explore this will be posted in a later video because I did film it in 4k and I want to get all of my videos that I filmed in 1080p out first so to start off I bought five packs of D cell batteries from the dollar store these are pretty cheap and I decided to do a lot at once because the process is pretty dirty and I didn't really want to do it again also D cell batteries are the best ones to get because they're the biggest which means that you have to fewer batteries to get more if you had to do this process with double A's or triple A's I would just really feel bad for you so for the first and somewhat obvious step we need to take the batteries out of the packaging so I do this pretty quickly and then I just dump them all together on the table the next thing we do is we target the victim that will be sacrificed first the opening of the battery takes a little bit of technique and you need a screwdriver it might be hard to see but there's actually a crease where the outer casing of the battery comes together it kind of folds together in a weird way and you need to use a screwdriver to separate it the first time you try it it might look like this and it's hard to separate you apply some force and it still doesn't come apart if this happens it means you're not using a good technique here is a shot of where a better technique is used and you'll see the big difference it might not be the case for you but for me the ends of the outer casing were crimped together in such a way that one was kind of slid in under the other so instead of forcing things you need to push with the screwdriver and unforced and once this is done the battery casing comes off pretty easily this battery casing is kind of useless and I just tossed it in the garbage so now we have our inner shell of the battery and the first thing to do is remove this plastic casing the plastic casing simply serve to separate the zinc from the outer shell of the battery once the plastic casing comes off a couple other pieces fall off and these are also garbage at the top you can see the carbon electrode and the first thing we do is we tear off this plastic piece when we look inside there's a little piece of cardboard and I remove this using a screwdriver once it's removed underneath we can see the manganese dioxide now for the fun part of removing the manganese dioxide and to do this I dug it out using a screwdriver at first I thought this was the best method but it proved to be pretty messy and pretty annoying there's actually cardboard between the manganese dioxide and the shell of the battery and it's important not to pull this with the screwdriver otherwise you'll mix it in with your manganese dioxide after doing this I thought that there must be a better method because this one frankly really sucked I found that the better method was actually using a pair of pliers and immediately pulling out the carbon electrode once the electrode was removed we had a lot more leverage with the screwdriver and everything came out much quicker so you can see in this shot I'm not digging and I Jam the screwdriver in the bottom and then I can pull out a lot of manganese dioxide at once I only need to do this two or three times until almost all of the manganese dioxide was removed doing it this way also damaged the paper less and therefore there was less paper contamination you so this is wood all the manganese dioxide at the end looked like with all the carbon electrodes on the right and all the empty zinc cans on the left to wash the cans and the electrodes I simply put them in a bucket of water and shook a lot I had to empty the water every time refill it and do several rinsing but once it was done they were all fairly clean although they were no longer completely covered with manganese dioxide they all still had a little bit on it at the time I didn't really have an amazing way to clean it but I figured when the time came that I wanted to use these in something I would clean them better so I left all of the zinc and the carbon rods out to dry and then I put them away so now to deal with her manganese dioxide mixed in with her manganese dioxide is a little bit of electrolyte and we need to wash this away with water so to do this I started by adding a bunch of distilled water then using a glass stir rod I started to mix it around however after mixing just for several seconds I realized it was way too thick to act as a real washing I kept trying to add water and hope said it would liquefy more but this was a dead dream I knew at that point that I had to move on and use a larger container I cut open the water jug that he used earlier to clean the zinc and the carbon and I pour it in all of my manganese dioxide it might be a little hard to see in this shot but at the bottom there was still a lot of thick manganese dioxide to do a proper washing we're going to have to have a lot more water I wash the beaker a few times with water to get out as much manganese dioxide as possible and then I put the beaker aside I then added a little bit more of distilled water and mixed it our goal here is to have a really liquidy slurry where almost all of the manganese dioxide is floating around in suspension this way it all gets washed and then we can simply just leave it and let the manganese dioxide separate to the bottom even after adding more water it was still pretty thick so I added more water and it's black because I use that water to rinse the beaker that we used earlier once a lot of the manganese dioxide has settled we should be left with a fairly thick water layer on top which we can decant and then we can refill it with more water the washing steps here are honestly not going to be amazing and they're still going to be a little electrolyte left over anyway it was watery enough now and I let it sit out for almost a day it's really hard to see but at the top there's actually a thick water layer as I pour it you can see that the liquid going into the beaker is actually clear the black color of the solution is actually due to the manganese dioxide that was left over in the beaker this solution at the top doesn't really have much manganese dioxide and we discard it if you want to do another washing step you can add more water stir it up and let it separate again for me personally I only used one because I didn't care too much about the purity so as I said before we don't need this solution anymore and we can discard it for this step I opted to vacuum filter off the remains at the bottom I only did this because the volume I had to take off was very small if I vacuumed filtered immediately without allowing the manganese dioxide to separate from the water the filtering step would have taken a very long time you don't need to vacuum filter it though you could in theory just pour it into a large tray and let it air dry I was a little bit pressed for time though because I wanted to do the bromine synthesis the following day so this was at night and I want to get it done before I went to sleep after the water is gone I keep the vacuum pulled on it to get it as dry as possible once this is done I transferred it to a crystallizing dish you can see that it's pretty pasty and definitely not dry and to fix this I'm going to dry it in the oven you might notice at the bottom of my crystallizing dish looks pretty dirty but it's actually okay I'm not really sure what it is but strong base bath piranha solution and acid washes don't get rid of it I continue to filter the rest of the solution that remained in the bucket and then I also transferred that to the crystallizing dish once it was all transferred I was left with a nice amount of black paste so as I said the next step is to put it into an oven once it is dried in the oven for a little while you can see the big difference we're left with a nice clumpy mixture of manganese dioxide if you want you could break up these clumps and powder eyes them but I honestly didn't really care so the next thing that I did was I transferred it to a container for storage the recovery of manganese dioxide from the batteries was about 290 grams I think I can assume that I probably lost something like a gram per battery so this means that each battery probably contained about 30 grams of manganese dioxide that's all I have to say about manganese dioxide and in the future you will see me use it to make bromine for the zinc I'll probably find some use for it as a catalyst or whether I convert it to something like zinc chloride but for the carbon electrodes I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with those as usual that's all I have for now and I hope to see you on the next one again here's a list of the videos that I'm currently editing and future videos I plan to film in the videos being edited category you can vote for the one that you want me to publish next and in the future video category you can vote for the one that you want me to film next also if you're feeling generous please donate to my patreon account because with a bigger budget per video I can do more things also instead of stockpiling videos I've decided I'm going to publish them as soon as I added them so in the next month or so there's going to be a lot of videos coming out on my patreon I also added a milestone and if we get to 250 dollars per video I'll commit to doing videos for at least six months

Channel: NileRed

Views: 610,920

Keywords: manganese, dioxide, mno2, how, to, battery, batteries, zinc, carbon, extract, bromine, open, nile, red, chemistry, project, diy, nilered

Id: XC5q9mDKUCo

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2016