Making Calcium Acetate (from eggshells)

hey guys so we're finally getting around to making the calcium acetate that I've been promising for a while now the calcium acetate that we make here is going to be used to make acetone and it's also going to be used to make flammable jelly to make the calcium acetate it's actually really simple and all we need to do is mix some form of calcium carbonate with vinegar there are a lot of different sources of calcium carbonate but in this video I'm going to be using eggshells so as you can see here I have my eggshells on the left and my vinegar on the right the vinegar that I'm using is actually cleaning vinegar which means it's a 10% solution of acetic acid which is twice as strong as normal vinegar because the procedure requires that we boil away all the water that we add if you use 5% vinegar it will also work you're just going to have to boil away twice as much water I used in total about 76 grams of eggshells and about 800 milliliters of the cleaning vinegar I use slightly more eggshells than I needed so there was an excess of calcium carbonate which means that all of the acetic acid should be consumed so when we do the boiling down step we don't boil acetic acid into the air to a 1 liter beaker was added about 800 milliliters of the 10% vinegar to the vinegar we start to add the 76 grams of egg shells that were crushed up a little bit I was a little bit afraid of too much foaming occurring so I only added about half of the egg shells at first I then use a glass stir rod to try to mix things around because right now it's just all sitting at the top as I do this a lot of co2 bubbles are formed and you can see that it leads to a little bit of foaming once it seems like things won't get too out of control I add the rest of the eggshells I try to control some of the foaming and bubbling using the glass stir rod but you can see that it actually almost overflowed I was lucky that it didn't but I would highly suggest using a larger container if you plan to do it on the same scale as I did after several minutes though the foaming should decrease and at this point it's pretty much just a waiting game every so often I mixed it around so the eggshells would sink to the bottom but they would very quickly produce co2 which carries them back up to the surface I thought this was pretty annoying but it's something that you can't really avoid if you're using eggshells so we just need to keep doing that stirring letting it sink to the bottom and have it go back to the top the reaction that's occurring is pretty simple and it's effectively just an acid-base reaction between our base calcium carbonate and our acid acetic acid to produce calcium acetate water and carbon dioxide gas the calcium carbonate is very insoluble in water so the extra calcium carbonate will be filtered off but the calcium acetate is soluble and will remain in solution I let it react over a day or so until it seemed like there wasn't much co2 being produced anymore because we use an excess of eggshells and the yolk sac of the eggs are not made of calcium carbonate there is going to be a bunch of stuff left over to get rid of all of the extra junk I filtered the solution through four filter papers the solution that makes it through is going to be much more clear but it's still going to be a little bit cloudy just be patient and let everything filter through and in the end you should be left with a relatively clear solution which might be a little bit off colored like you see here once everything is filtered through I remove the funnel I added a stir bar and I turned on the hot plate this is the boiling step that I mentioned earlier and what we're doing here is we're heating up our solution to boil away all of the water so that we're left with just our calcium acetate what's interesting is the solubility of calcium acetate actually decreases as we raise the temperature so eventually when it gets hot enough some of the calcium acetate actually precipitates out of solution you'll know when this point is reached because the solution will become cloudy like you see here as we keep boiling down the solution the color might become more and more yellow we get around to this point we have to be careful because the solution might spontaneously freeze once the amount of water decreases to a certain point that it can't contain the calcium acetate everything's going to crash out and you really need to take it off the hot plate when this happens I didn't take it off right away and if you look at the bottom it started to turn brown a little bit because the impurities in the calcium acetate started to burn on the hot plate anyway what we have to do now is we scoop out the calcium state from the beaker and we do our best not to include any of the brown stuff on the bottom this was actually quite easy to do and just after a few minutes I was left with a nice large pile of calcium acetate paste I laid it out to dry and then I crushed it up into the fine powder that you see here one important thing to know is that although the product here looks very white and clean it's not actually super pure a bunch of the yellow impurity whatever that is from the eggs is actually still present so when you add this calcium acetate to water the water might take on a slight yellow color for our purposes it really really doesn't matter because we're just trying to make some alcohol jelly and we're just trying to make some acetone from it and purity in these cases are really not a big issue just as a side note for this method tums don't work as a calcium carbonate source if you try to do the same thing it will turn to a brown mess when you try to boil it this is mostly due to the presence of sucrose in the tums that's breaking down in the future I might make a video of using tums as a calcium carbonate source for calcium acetate but I'm not sure what I'll do that I want to thank you guys a lot because just as of recently I've gotten a lot more supporters the unfortunate part is now I have a lot of $5 supporters but it's going to be really hard to read out everybody's name individually so I'm sad to say that in this video I'm not going to be reading out names and I don't think I'm going to be doing that in the future I will of course still include your name in the credits I just think it's getting to the point where it's kind of ridiculous to read out each one you

Channel: NileRed

Views: 246,326

Keywords: calcium, acetate, how, to, make, nile, red, chemistry, egg, shell, eggshell, acetone, jelly, alcohol, flammable

Id: 32vCLXTjnyQ

Length: 6min 10sec (370 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 02 2016