Looks like it's working at least it's doing something. (Intro music) Hi everyone welcome back Cody's lab so in today's video I want to try making a metal that is used in everything from pop cans to airplanes and I want to try sourcing it from natural materials that I can dig out of the ground on the ranch and that metal is aluminum now the only problem with that is i live here in the Great Basin and most of our rocks here are limestone now in order to form in ore that i could easily extract aluminum from I'm going to have to have material that started off as being granite or another feldspar containing rock and then that rock must be weathered chemically weathered by acidic rainwater for a very long time eventually that would turn into clay. Now we do have materials here that resemble clay you go down to the Great Salt Lake you got that sticky material that everyone calls clay but it's really not clay 'cause if you try to make bricks out of it and the fire it will fall apart because once again it's made mostly of lime and lime breaks down when you heat it is just not the right material same particle size is why it feels the same but it's not clay. And even if we do have sources of clay here the problem is then that clay is not really the thing we're looking for because it contains way too much silica it does have a lot of aluminum in it but clay is formed from aluminum silicates and you really need something that has a very high concentration of aluminum otherwise it's not worth your time to extract in order to go from clay material its high, or higher, in aluminum you've got to continue to weather it and leach that silica out with more and more rain water. Now you're going to need a flat surface, warm temperatures, and a lot of time, and that usually does not happen this far north it usually happens in the tropics that's why most mines that produce the raw materials for aluminum are down in the tropical regions so in order to get some material that i can actually process and extract aluminum from i'm going to have to find something with the highest aluminum content that i can and so I've come up here to one of my mining claims you see up here in the distance you can see the rocks up there are kind of covered in snow but there's a little bit of a twist in the rocks because there's actually a fault there it's a thrust fault he goes up like this and that actually happened before these mountains formed so that faults not really active anymore the mountains of since risen up and the rocks have moved around since but the fault is still there and that fault was active from millions years. Old faults like this tend to contain large concentration of minerals and that is why there's a mine right here. The mine was dug directly into the fault you can see the fault right there you've got some bioturbated silica-rich limestone here it's chert nodules in the limestone and over here we have shale there's a little bit of sandstone right here interbedded with shale now shale was actually laid down in a tropical region in fact the limestone was as well. 500 million years ago this was a shallow sea and we had water coming off of mountains which were granitic and they contained all the materials to create these rocks the carbonates were pulled out of the water by marine animals and when they died their skeletons piled up forming the limestone but any clays that were washed into the sea settled down to form shale. Now you may know something about shale and that's that it's very flaky see how i can just pull it apart by my hands it's very soft flaky and it's in sheets and what happens is when the clay packs down on the bottom of the sea it squeezes the water out and the aluminum silicate sheets line up with each other and form these flaky shale rocks. Now, if you weather shale you react it with water once again it's fairly easy to turn back into clay in fact many places that do produce brick especially here in the western United States usually start with shale they spread it out so the water can get to it and they form clay now here because this is a fault line if a lot of water is actually able to get to the shale and so clay is formed rather rapidly and it's also ground up by the motion of the earth But there's one more thing the water here is acidic and so the clay is also weathered even further ok so here we are the moisture content in here is kind of high so it may fog up the camera but if we look up here you can actually see the fault and where material has fallen down from it. Now this material here that is broken up by the fault is called gouge and since we are in a section of this where a lot of the gouge contains shale, the shale is actually weathered into this clay material here. Now I've actually done some tests on this quite a while ago we had an assay done on it and the aluminum content of this was quite high, higher than most clays that I've ever seen in fact. That's because this clay is sitting here for millions of years and groundwater is flowed through this fault acidified by minerals in the rock and has further weathered the clay into something which is close to bauxite as I could probably possibly find. so clay is comprised of aluminum silicate but when the silica is weathered out now this does take a long time because as you may suspect glass bottles do not dissolve in water very quickly but the aluminum oxide is far less soluble than even the silica so over time the silica is preferentially weathered out leaving behind the aluminum oxide let's grab us a nice sample of this I think this one would be nice let's go home and see if I can get the aluminum out. Well okay, heh heh, shouldn't have poured hot water there last time so here's my sample of clay here now I need to crush this up to make a slurry in order to do any useful chemistry with it so let's wrap it in a rag smash it with a metal brick (Thudding sounds and occasional clink of metal on stone) Okay now i have clay powder which I will now mix with some warm water to dissolve it into a slurry. This step is mostly to get out the large pieces of rock and other contaminants that are not clay just slowly pour this out and I'll leave the bottom portion in place as you see that's mostly gravel and sand so now I've got a slurry of clay in my bucket. so the elements I have here listed by mass are oxygen, silicon, aluminum, hydrogen, because it's mostly water, and then you've got your trace elements such as iron, titanium, magnesium, et cetera, now industrially the way that they isolate the alumina is to dissolve everything in hot concentrated lye solution. The sodium hydroxide dissolves both the alumina and the silica but not the iron and some other elements the only problem is that alumina is only soluble in sodium hydroxide at very high temperatures around 200 degrees Celsius in order to achieve that I would have to seal it and pressurize the mixture. That process for me is going to be a little bit inefficient and to be honest I've got enough people calling the ATF on my behalf saying that I've been making pipe bombs so rather than that i'm going to just empty this into this crock pot here so I can get it out of the leaky bucket and then I'm just going to add in some hydrochloric acid now hydrochloric acid will dissolve the alumina it will not dissolve silica unfortunately the hydrochloric acid will dissolve iron and possibly the titanium as well but they'll be in concentrations that slow enough for me to deal with let's just put a bunch of that in there and i'm going to plug in this crock pot and heat it up for a little while until the alumina has had a good chance to dissolve into the hydrochloric acid now this has had some time to cook and remove this lid I'm going to pour most of this off especially this semi-clear liquid at the top into this other jug. now what I should have in the liquid is a dilute solution of aluminum chloride and apparently some hydrochloric acid Oh, come on and what's left in here should be primarily the silica and there might be a little bit of aluminum left if there was any a crystalline aluminum oxide the hydrochloric acid would have a hard time dissolving it so I added a little bit of extra water to this to help it wash out the aluminum chloride as you can see the material here is a lot lighter in color that's because the hydrochloric acid has dissolved away a lot of the iron. so now this is settled out a little bit let's open this jug back up let's pour off this clarified solution into this glass over here so now i should have primarily aluminum chloride, little bit of iron and whatever else the hydrochloric acid dissolved maybe magnesium and stuff probably not a whole lot of titanium but that's also a possibility now to my orange juice looking fluid i'm going to add in a little bit more lye this will neutralize the hydrochloric acid making the solution more alkaline and then what will happen to the aluminum chloride is it will precipitate from solution as aluminum hydroxide so I think we're getting somewhere think i'm very close you can see a brownish mud forming and if I pull some of this out of there yes it is a gelatinous material that looks like a little hydroxide to me it looks like it is contaminated with stuff the green coloring I'd say is probably the iron yeah it's gonna be kind of hard to get rid of all that iron and it's not too bad i can still work with it I think fortunately iron hydroxide is roughly 7,000 times more soluble than aluminum oxide so I could pretty easily separate the two just by rinsing with copious amounts of water let's stir this in let it settle and repeat so this is what I'm left with after washing several times in water this is my aluminum hydroxide here and that is very goopy still there's not a whole lot here but there we go that's my product now I gotta dry this out and heat it up to a thousand degrees Celsius to calcine it and remove all the moisture all the hydrogen from it leaving me with pure aluminum oxide or alumina get the furnace out ok so I've got into graphite crucible here tip it out there presumably is my alumina here's a little bit better shot of my aluminum oxide yeah feels about right this would be a good that polishing compound here 'cause it's in a fine powder but it's also a very hard material yeah alright so now i think i'm going to use electrolysis just like they do it industrially to produce the pure aluminum metal it's starting to snow on me so you might be aware that aluminum oxide like this has a very high melting point and in order to do electrolysis on it i'm gonna have to have it in a liquid state now to do that I'm going to mix it with some crydite this material here is sodium aluminum fluoride this is a naturally occurring mineral but it's so rare that the only samples of that I've ever seen was in the museum so i had to buy this but it's a pretty easy to make if you have hydrofluoric acid you just react the hydrofluoric acid with the aluminum oxide and what this does is going to mix with the aluminum oxide lowering the melting point is something that I can actually handle now the cryolite really isn't used up in the reaction it can be recycled over and over again so I'm not really too worried about buying it like I did so here's the plan I have this fajita pan here hooked to the negative electrode and I've got the positive electrode to this carbon rod here you can see they conduct electricity I've got it hooked to a 6-volt 40 amp source but I can change that if I need to now for the gases that are gonna be produced from this reaction you're probably primarily going to have oxygen and carbon dioxide and the carbon is going to come from the rod has it reacts with the oxygen now there's also the potential to form carbon monoxide as well as hydrogen fluoride that's why I've got this fan here blowing the air away alright so let's pull this out see if we can do it looks like its molten good sign shut down there's electricity doesn't seem to be producing much reaction let's see the problem is I'm not let's turn up the current yeah it's like my carbon rod is just cooling the crydite to it it's not actually getting good electrical contact there so I'm going to try this again if you have to preheat the rod so this time I've preheated everything in the furnace see the rod is now red-hot see if I can get ahold of this without causing an arc all right looks like it's working there we go that's the way get this camera in a little closer I guess (Electric buzzing of arcs forming) It looks like it's working or at least it's doing something I put electricity through it for quite a while presumably there might be some aluminum metal in there let's put it back in the furnace and melt this all up once again and I'll pour it out and see what I've got after several days worth of work That's not good! Ah! Got some shiny bits ok there's definitely a little ball of something right there let's set this aside for now looks like there might be some more little balls inside of the slag the biggest ones right there it is that looks like a shiny piece of metal to me oh man it actually worked obviously I didn't make very much but that's something here's my two beads of metal you see they're quite shiny and they feel very light that is just more confirmation that this is indeed aliminum. that's awesome actually was able to pull it off who else do you know has made aluminum from scratch at home that's awesome. So hope y'all enjoyed i'll see you next time so today I want to try making aluminum otherwise pronounced as aluminium or how i will try to from now on aluminum just to mess with everyone now aluminum is a very reactive material it loves to bind together with oxygen that's why thermite is so energetic in order to extract it is very difficult even though it's one of the more common minerals in the Earth's crust however not in my area unfortunately you see the rocks behind me are calcium carbonate they were put down at the bottom of a shallow sea back in the Mississippian era from corals and stuff
That titlegore.
Anyway,
really cool video /u/codydon, but wouldnt it have been more efficient to electrolyze the Al(OH)3?