Storing mercury without water

just a little while ago I distilled mercury and it was brought to my attention that I didn't store it in the best way I stored the mercury under water to reduce the amount of vapor that came off but this does lead to some problems first of all the bottle is a closed system so even if the mercury is evaporating at a slower rate the bottle will eventually fill up with vapor it seems that keeping water over mercury is more useful if you're working with an open container for long-term storage it seems like the vapor is build-up anyway and all you really need is a nice tightly capped bottle the second major problem is that even though I distilled the mercury it's not super pure a lot of commercial mercury is distilled three times and the super pure stuff is distilled many more so although my mercury appears shiny it still might contain some contaminants in the presence of these contaminants the water on top will slowly get murky and dirty over time just as an example here's the mercury before I distilled it the water in the bottle on the left is relatively clear because the mercury was only stored for something like four months the bottle on the right was stored for about a year and a half and you can see the water is pretty dirty anyway for these two reasons and the added fact that mercury looks much cooler without water on top I decided to get rid of the water also this bottle wasn't exactly the most secure and even though it was shatterproof it still was an ideal to get rid of the water the fastest way is to just add it to a separatory funnel I was honestly a little bit scared during this step because I was adding about nine pounds of mercury and I wasn't sure if my separatory funnel could hold this it was probably more than strong enough to hold everything but just the idea that it could break made me kind of nervous after sitting in the separatory funnel for 30 seconds almost all of the water should have separated so I start to drain the mercury to prevent mercury from splashing I had to lift the beaker a little and unfortunately this obstructs your view a bit so just for you guys I stopped during the mercury and I reposition the SEP funnel this is probably the way that it should have started things off but anyway now that it's deeper in the beaker the splashing is much less once I'm done draining away the mercury the separatory funnel is taken away and the water is transferred to a mercury waste container the water contains trace amounts of mercury so it's really important to not pour it down the drain at this point almost all of the water should be gone but just to dry things further I'm going to use a paper towel this is definitely not the official way to dry mercury and it's just something I thought would be easy to do the mercury and the paper towel will will more or less repel each other but water should be absorbed although this should pick up the majority of water there's almost definitely water still left over to really get the mercury dry we would either have to heat it under vacuum at an elevated temperature or to carry out another distillation I really didn't want to do either of these things so I accepted the fact that my mercury would be a little bit wet it's hard to see but the paper towel left some fibers in the mercury anyway the next thing that we do is a filtration through some cotton the major purpose of this is to get rid of any solid contamination that might have formed during storage as well as the paper towel fibers an added benefit is that cotton absorbs water so the mercury will be dried a little bit more the procedure here is pretty simple and I did the exact same thing in my previous mercury cleaning video the mercury is added on top of the cotton and then using the plunger I force it through in the bottle below I collect nice and shiny mercury and now I just have to keep repeating the addition until all of the mercury is filtered the syringe is filled with the last bit of mercury and then everything you squeeze through I push the plunger to the very bottom and held it there for several seconds to try to force out as much mercury as possible when I felt I got out as much mercury as I could the syringe was taken away the cotton and syringe is full of mercury and it definitely can't be thrown out the syringe in the cotton had to be thoroughly and properly cleaned before tossing them or it can be given to a proper mercury waste service anyway now that I'm done filtering the mercury I go ahead and securely cap the bottle I now have a bottle of relatively water free mercury but it's dangerous to store mercury in glass if anything potentially dangerous is stored in a glass bottle there should be some sort of secondary containment in my case I got an acrylic container from Walmart or put the mercury bottle in I dumped in some sulfur the reaction between mercury and sulfur is extremely slow drum temperature but it's still useful to add for short-term storage it would make no sense but for long-term storage if any mercury vapor were to escape the bottle it would have enough time to react with the sulfur just so I didn't dirty the bottle up with sulfur I made a small plastic bag sleeve the bottle of mercury was placed into the container it was snapped shut and I'm pretty much done at this point it's really recommended to use a plastic or steel container instead of glass because glass can obviously shatter however I found that the mercury looked much nicer in this glass bottle so I sacrifice safety for beauty at some point in the future though I'll probably invest in a nice clear plastic bottle it's also recommended to pack the outer container with something like kitty litter to prevent the inside bottle from moving and to protect it from impact however again for purely aesthetic reasons I wanted to be able to see the mercury so I obviously didn't do that in the end though I think this is mostly fine as long as I don't throw it across the room or knock it off the table I just have to be really careful when I take the bottle out and go to pour the mercury because if I were to drop it and it shattered it would be pretty catastrophic anyway I guess I'll see how this water free mercury holds up with long-term storage

Channel: NileRed

Views: 135,866

Rating: 4.9428821 out of 5

Keywords: nile, red, chemistry, mercury, update, storage

Id: m03Bke3CLFM

Length: 7min 4sec (424 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2017