Mixing sodium with mercury

this video has been sponsored by Nord VPN you can get a special deal and support the channel by visiting Nord VPN comm / nyle rad over the years I've worked with mercury many times and it's almost always a bit of a pain because it requires special handling as well as waste management but despite this I think it's still slowly becoming one of my favorite elements the thing that I find most interesting about it is its ability to form alloys with most other metals at relatively low temperatures this process is generally known as amalgamation and it often leads to some really interesting and sometimes weird-looking interactions I've already kind of covered this a bit in previous videos for gold and aluminum but for most other metals there's very little information there are also pretty much no photos or videos to even see what their amalgams look like so because of this I've decided to start an amalgam series and my goal is to try to combine mercury with as many different metals as possible for this video which I guess is now technically the third in the series I've decided to try it with sodium metal sodium metal is a highly reactive element and it especially likes to react with things like oxygen and water so when storing it it's usually kept under a layer of an inert solvent like mineral oil to help protect it from air and moisture however this method is by no means perfect and over time the sodium still slowly tarnishes the last time that I cleaned this sodium was almost three years ago and I'm actually surprised that it doesn't look worse than this before I could even try and combine it with mercury I had to first take some of it out of this jar and remove the oil so I pulled out what looked like a decently sized piece and I put it on some paper towel then using some more paper towel I tried to get rid of as much mineral oil as possible at this point it would probably be okay to use but I wanted to really make sure that all the oil was gone so I transferred it to a small beaker and I poured in some toluene this solvent will dissolve any oil that remains but unlike the oil it easily evaporates before this I never made any sodium amalgam before but based on what I read online I knew that the reaction could be quite violent one procedure that I read even recommended covering the top of the reaction vessel to block any flaming sodium that might be shot out the top of it so to stay on the safer side at least until I kind of knew how this whole process worked I decided to cut the sodium into some smaller pieces sodium's are relatively soft metal so this was pretty easy to do just using a knife on the inside it was all still fresh sodium so it was initially nice and shiny however it almost immediately started reacting with moisture and oxygen and it started to tarnish I wanted to prevent this as much as possible so I cut the sodium as fast as I could and when I was done with each piece I immediately dropped it back into the toluene in this shot I only showed me cutting one of these really small pieces but I ended up cutting most of the sodium down to around this size now it was time to set up the mercury side of things as I mentioned before this reaction was apparently notorious for a lot of splashing as well as flaming sodium to deal with this some procedures suggested just using a really large flask but they were also doing it on a much larger scale I figured that because I was only doing this with a few milliliters of mercury a large test tube would probably be fine so I pour it in a random small amount of mercury and then I pulled out my small piece of sodium quickly dried it and threw it in I was kind of nervous that I'd immediately get fire in molten sodium but nothing happened the major reason for this seemed to be that the sodium was just a bit too tarnished and it prevented it from coming into contact with the mercury the sodium is also weight less dense than the mercury so it kind of just floated on top which didn't really help either to fix this according to some procedures that I read it's pretty common to use something like a glass rod and to shove the sodium into the mercury then once it's underneath it can be scraped and crushed to expose the fresh sodium so I decided to try this and initially I still had some trouble getting it started but then suddenly there was a little thump and all the sodium instantly disappeared then when I mixed it around a bit I noticed that the texture of the mercury had also changed the reason for this was because as the sodium combined with the mercury it didn't do it uniformly the reaction was extremely fast and the mercury that was around the sodium took up most of it and got a relatively high concentration and when the concentration of sodium gets above about 1% by mass and mercury it starts to solidify so what this gave me was a bunch of solid sodium amalgam mixed in with some regular liquid mercury however after I let it sit there for a few minutes the sodium slowly dispersed evenly throughout the mercury and most of the solid bits disappeared it kind of went back to more or less looking like regular mercury but the one major difference was that it was now sticking to the glass a bit I then continued adding more sodium but even the next one didn't result in any fire or sparks on my third run though I used a slightly bigger piece of sodium and I managed to get some fire I couldn't find a good reference for exactly what was going on here but then again I don't think it's too complicated as the amalgam forms it generates a lot of heat which quickly causes all the sodium to melt this increase in temperature and surface area causes the sodium to react even faster which in turn generates even more heat and it creates a positive feedback loop so the moment that the reaction starts the rate increases exponentially and all the sodium almost instantly disappears at the same time though the liquid sodium is trying to float to the top and the mercury around the sodium is getting heated to its boiling point and the result of this is that if the liquid sodium doesn't all get consumed before it reaches the surface it'll be ejected and it'll start reacting with oxygen I imagine that the two major factors that would affect this would be how much sodium is being reacted and how deep it is in the mercury when it starts reacting I think for the first two additions I just didn't use very much sodium and I put it really deep in the mercury so it had more than enough time to all be consumed as it continued adding more sodium I started getting a lot of solid chunks that wouldn't disappear this told me that the overall concentration of sodium was now probably getting above two percent and at this point I'd run out of small pieces of sodium to add so I went to cut some more however when I came back only a few minutes later the entire thing had solidified I thought that maybe it had just cooled down a bit so I tried seeing if I could melt it using my heat gun however even after shooting it at max heat for over a minute it was still completely solid I then let it cool to room temperature and hope that maybe it would shrink a bit so I could knock it out of the tube but that didn't turn out to be the case and I just had to smash it it ended up coming out as almost a completely intact chunk and the glass also didn't end up sticking to it at all I then collected the large piece and anything else that I could get without pulling glass along with it the amalgam didn't feel very strong and I felt that dropping it just like a centimeter would be enough to break it but that apparently wasn't the case and to break it I just ended up pushing on it a bit it fell apart pretty easily and on the inside it revealed some really nice crystals sodium apparently forms at least six different stable solids with mercury and each of which have a different crystal structure so what I have here is probably just a jumbled mess of all the different forms I have absolutely no idea what the exact concentration of sodium is here but I think it's somewhere around five percent sodium amalgams can apparently go as high as 25% or more though according to some sources that I've read but considering that this amalgam had completely solidified on me I'm not sure how they get to percentage that high anyway several minutes later I moved on to store the amalgam and it had already started to tarnish I wanted to prevent it from degrading even more so after everything was added to the vial I flushed it with some nitrogen this was my final result which I thought was pretty in what I thought was really cool was that just by adding a small amount of sodium I was able to completely solidify the mercury enough to crush it into powder but now as a quick safety note I do have to say that the dust that the amalgam lets off is extremely dangerous if I were to breathe some of it in not only would I be getting small amounts of sodium reacting in my lungs I would also be breathing in a bunch of mercury I'm okay because I'm using a good fume hood but it's still really important to be careful for this project I had to read a lot of different papers and procedures and I think the warning in this one was my favorite out of all of them it said that breathing in the dust could lead to pronounced symptoms of mercury poisoning which to me doesn't really sound ideal what I did find funny though was that you could tell this paper was really old just based on their really outdated safety method I guess it was back in the good old days when safety wasn't as serious as it is today but they just suggested to wear a moist gauze over your face to block the dust but anyway now that all that safety talks done I can move on to playing around with the amalgam so I went back to my vial took out a small amount of it and just dumped it into some water and almost immediately the sodium in the amalgam started reacting with it to produce hydrogen gas and sodium hydroxide the mercury here is mostly just a carrier and it doesn't actually take part in any reaction so as the sodium was consumed the relative concentration of mercury increased and it was slowly able to turn back into a liquid this is the exact same reaction that sodium would normally have with water but because it's diluted in the mercury it's much less vigorous with pure sodium it usually reacts way too violently and ends in an explosion so the main use of the amalgam is that it lets us safely combine both sodium and water and in chemistry this can be really useful because the hydrogen that it produces can be used in other reactions known as reductions so for example with the sodium amalgam it's possible to reduce glucose to the artificial sweetener called sorbitol if you look at the differences in their structures here which I've highlighted in red you can see that the sorbitol has two extra hydrogen's now outside of chemistry probably the biggest use of the amalgam is in sodium vapor lamps the light is generated from a mixture of vaporized sodium and mercury and it's commonly used as street lamps or as plant grow lights okay so now that I've made the solid amalgam I really want to try directly making it in its liquid form and on top of this I also wanted to try making the amalgam on a larger scale so I weighed out a hundred grams of mercury and one gram of sodium metal the reason I chose this ratio was because as I mentioned before when the concentration of sodium is at or below 1% it's able to stay as a liquid I also preheated the mercury a bit because this can help soften the sodium and make the reaction easier to start however as we saw before this wasn't really necessary but I figured I'd just give it a try this time I got fired with every piece that I added and I think it was because the mercury was just more spread out and the sodium pieces were larger and although this is something that I wanted to happen before it kind of wasn't ideal now all the sodium that burns just represents a loss and on top of this the oxides that form contaminate my amalgam so besides safety reasons this is why most of the time when people make this they first do something to protect it from oxygen and one of the simplest ways to do this is to just replace all of the air with nitrogen to demonstrate this and so that you could actually see what was going on I transferred everything into a clean flask then I lowered in my tube that was connected to my nitrogen tank and I pushed out all of the air pure nitrogen is denser than air so once it's filled in the flask it should just sit there and the air won't be able to get back in now to test this out I lowered in a somewhat large piece of sodium and well there was fire it's still popped and fizzled like the other times but it didn't coat the inside of the flask with all those nasty oxidation products I continued adding the rest of the one gram of sodium and you can see that now without the oxygen the process is a lot cleaner and safer what I thought was cool was how the very last piece reacted all the other times it happened below the surface of the mercury so we couldn't really see what was going on but now it was a lot more clear and we can see the sodium quickly reacting and causing the mercury around it to solidify after everything was added I mixed it around for a few minutes to try and dissolve as many of the solid pieces as possible and when I felt that it was pretty much all liquid again I poured it into a vial then like before once it was all added I flushed it out with nitrogen I kind of already mentioned it earlier but I did find interesting was just how much the liquid sodium amalgam liked to stick to the glass but anyway this was all still kind of hot from the reaction so for the moment I put it somewhere to cool in the meantime I decided to clean my flasks and to do this I just had to pour in some water as we saw before this will slowly destroy any sodium that's present and eventually I'll just be left with mercury the mercury here though won't be as pure as the nice distilled stuff that I started with so I'm not gonna recombine it and I'll just put it in a separate container now going back to the amalgam the top part of it had become kind of pasty at first I thought the whole thing had solidified but it pretty easily just went back to being a liquid I'm not exactly sure why this happened but apparently as it cooled some of the more concentrated amalgam floated to the top by mixing it though I was able to get a much more uniform distribution of the sodium and it all went back to being liquid so now I have the liquid amalgam but what can this do that the solid one can't well as far as I know in terms of practical chemistry the answer is not very much besides the major difference that one's a solid and the others are liquid the only other big difference just comes down to sodium concentration this will end up affecting how vigorous the reaction is but in the end it's still the same reaction also as we saw earlier with the solid one as the reaction continues it ends up turning back into a liquid anyway I think the difference in reactivity though was highlighted pretty well when I tried adding the liquid 1 to water even after a minute it really didn't look like much was happening so to get things started I added a few drops of acid anyway now on the other hand in terms of cool and fun chemistry it is different and I think that this is really highlighted well by the so called ammonia amalgam this is what happens when a solution of ammonium chloride is added to the liquid form you and this is what happens with the solid one it's still puffed up just like the liquid one but the overall visual effect of it was really different this is a project that I'm currently working on along with the copper amalgam and both of these should be the next ones in the series I'm not going to make any promises on exactly when this will be released but it should be within the next month this year in general has been a really interesting one for the channel in January I moved out from working in my garage to a proper rental space and I built a studio and lab from scratch at the time I thought that I had more than enough space for the foreseeable future but that didn't turn out to be the case things continued to expand and in September I ended up hiring my brother to work with me and now as the year comes to an end I've run out of space again so for 2019 I'm gonna be moving into a new place this will allow me to be more efficient and to release more videos and it'll also let me expand into selling chemical kits and other merchandise however moving everything and setting it all up again won't exactly be free and this is why I've been really thankful this year to have sponsors like Nord VPN who help make things like this possible in short Nord VPN is a really useful service which helps anonymize your activity on the Internet it works by 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their three-year plan along with an extra month thrown in on top so if you want to increase your online security and support my channel at the same time you should definitely check out Nord VPN you can do this by going to Nord VPN comso shneail red by clicking the link in the description or by just using the code Nile rat now before I go I just want to mention a couple things about that whole move I was talking about this is currently the major project that I'm working on and when it's all done I am gonna post a video about it the last time that I moved I did also make a video about it but this one is gonna be different the other one mostly focused on the evolution of my channel and I glossed over a lot of the technical details so for this one I'm gonna focus a lot more on the building and logistical side of things I think going over step-by-step exactly how I put it all together and why I did it the way I did could be pretty interesting I honestly have no idea how long this will actually take but I think that by mid-february I should have the video out as usual a big things goes out to all my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me can see my videos at least 24 hours before I post them to YouTube also everyone on patreon can directly message me and if you support me with $5 or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here [Music]

Channel: NileRed

Views: 2,472,814

Rating: 4.9062519 out of 5

Keywords: nile, red, science, chemistry, sodium, mercury, amalgam, metal, reaction, reduction, amalgam series, aluminum and mercury, gold and mercury, nilered

Id: SoOyaDWIoMA

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 31 2018