Turning mercury into a weird sponge

almost every medal has a unique reaction with mercury and a couple of months ago I decided to make a series about it for the first video I started with sodium metal and I combined it with the mercury by just dropping pieces in and then squishing it down the reaction that occurred was extremely fast and it also generated a lot of heat this caused the sodium to melt almost instantly and sometimes it also splashed and ignited most of the sodium was dissolved though and the concentration of it in the mercury slowly rose when the concentration was below about 1% it stayed as a liquid but as it got above that it started to solidify I decided to make both of these forms and in the end I was left with this which still kind of just looked like regular mercury as well as these solid amalgam crystals now the reason that I started this series with sodium wasn't just random and it's because the sodium amalgam can be used as a gateway to other amalgams especially to those that are normally difficult to form one in particular that caught my eye was the ammonium amalgam which I first read about on Wikipedia the reason that stood out to me was because unlike all the other ones ammonium isn't a metal at least under normal conditions I really wanted to try making it and I found a paper from 1865 that outlined the general process it unfortunately didn't give exact details on how to repeat it but it was enough for me to get started it said that the liquid amalgam often worked better so I decided to try that first so using a syringe I pulled out a small amount of it and I added it to another vial then into this I poured in some 10% ammonia solution this was done just to see if it would have any reaction with the ammonia it seemed to be pretty much the same as with pure water though and nothing too interesting was happening the sodium in the amalgam basically just reacted with the water to make sodium hydroxide and hydrogen gas to form the ammonium amalgam I had to convert the ammonia which is nh3 into ammonium ions which are NH 4 plus 1 easy way to do this is to just add an acid like hydrochloric acid almost immediately the ammonium amalgam started forming and it all puffed up now as far as I know what's going on here isn't really known the general idea though seems to be a redox reaction between the sodium and the ammonium ions the sodium metal really wants to give up an electron and the ammonium ions which are positively charged are willing to accept it this causes the ammonium ions to lose their charge and become neutral and for the sodium metal to become sodium ions these sodium ions are quickly pushed out of the mercury and they combined with the chloride anions in solution to make sodium chloride the ammonium radical however which is now neutral seems to dissolve into the mercury in its normal ionic form this would never happen but it's believed that as a neutral radical it might act similarly to sodium metal it appears to be able to easily diffuse through the mercury but it isn't very stable so almost as quickly as it forms it starts breaking down into ammonia and hydrogen gas in general mercury tends to repel most things that aren't metal and gases usually pass right through it but in this case it was somehow solidifying which let it hold on to the gas again unfortunately it has never really been proven what's happening here but I feel like it's probably one of these two possibilities the first one is that like sodium a small amount of the ammonium radical might be able to solidify mercury and if that were the case it might even be possible that it could do it at a lower concentration the other possibility is that the distribution of the sodium in the mercury is somehow altered by both the reaction and all the bubbles that are being produced some of the sodium amalgam might be shifted around and it could cause some areas to have an increased concentration and in theory especially because I already started with a 1% amalgam a slight increase in concentration could cause parts of it to start solidifying for example if we look back to when before any of the acid was added all of the bubbling was already causing some weird rippling effect on the surface and in my opinion I thought this kind of looks similar to the sure of the ammonium amalgam these are just some of my ideas though and of course they could be wrong so I'd really like to know what you think in the comments and whether you agree with me or maybe if you have some sort of theory of your own but anyway after doing this a few times I noticed something in all these runs I let the sodium amalgam bubble for a while but if I added the acid right away the results were different instead of a nice and smooth expansion like the other ones it would really look like it was struggling the other times after adding the acid it took about five seconds for it to start floating but here it took closer to 20 it also had a much harder time holding on to the gas and it took a lot less time to turn back to a liquid okay so now that I had some sort of idea of how it all worked I wanted to try experimenting with it as we saw before the amalgam that formed was relatively unstable and it quickly started degrading into hydrogen and ammonia gas everything that I done so far was at room temperature but according to that paper from 1865 the degradation could be slowed down by keeping it cold to do this it was pretty simple and I just had to put a small bottle of 10% ammonia in some ice I let it sit there for something like 20 minutes and after this the general procedure was the same the first difference that I noticed was at this lower temperature the sodium amalgam in the water didn't really react very much I then added the acid and the reaction here was quite a bit slower as well in the other runs it usually took about five seconds from the first drop for it to expand enough to make it float but this time it consistently took around 10 seconds the sponge that initially formed seemed to be smaller and it took longer to expand to its maximum I initially assumed that this would make it last longer but that didn't seem to be the case I figured that a good end point was when the thing sank back down to the bottom and in every run whether it was cold or at room temperature it took almost exactly two minutes to do this this really surprised me because I assumed that the colder one would have lasted a lot longer but anyway from this it appeared that keeping it cold or letting it pre expand at room temperature were both decent ways to make the amalgam the lower temperature slowed things down a lot and it allowed me to add the acid right away however the expansion was a lot slower and I think I actually liked it when it went faster at room temperature the next thing I wanted to do was to get it out of the vial and to take a closer look but of course it wouldn't fit out the top I would have had to squish it down or wait for it to shrink but both of these options were pretty bad the only reason that I was doing it in a vial though was because it was easier for you guys to see so the very simple solution to this is to just sacrifice the visuals a bit and to instead do it in something open like a test tube for this run I did it on a slightly larger scale and I also used cold ammonia because now that was just what I had the moment that it stopped growing I poured out the water and I dumped it onto some paper towel it started degrading really quickly and I thought that this was because now without the water there weren't any ammonium ions to help keep it alive to test this I tried adding some pre-made ammonium chloride solution but it wasn't able to rescue it I then started poking at it a bit and it was wee softer than I expected it didn't last long and this semi solid stayed though and over the course of about thirty seconds it went back to being mostly a liquid after a couple minutes of sitting there it got coated with a white solid which I imagine was a sodium based salt maybe something like sodium chloride sodium hydroxide or sodium carbonate I tried adding more ammonium chloride solution but as I kind of expected it didn't grow however there was something weird happening on the surface which I thought was interesting I'm not exactly sure why this happened but over the course of the next couple minutes the effect slowly changed when the bubbling had almost completely stopped I tried adding more ammonium chloride and it split the drop which was kind of weird regular mercury would just do something like this and completely repel it so its surface tension had obviously been messed up a bit I think this might just be caused by some residual sodium that's left over but I'm not really sure the next thing I wanted to try was to do things the opposite way which was adding the sodium amalgam to a solution of ammonium chloride this was made by quickly adding some ten percent ammonia followed by a random amount of acid I mix it around and then I added some drops of the amalgam it turned out pretty much exactly as I expected it would but I thought it was still kind of cool so far everything had been done underwater but I wondered how it would look without all the liquid so I put some sodium amalgam onto a watch glass and I added some pre-made ammonium chloride this time instead of puffing up it stayed a lot more flat and I thought that it looked even more interesting than before it didn't last nearly as long but I figured that was just because it quickly used up all of the ammonium chloride so once it had shrunk down again I added some more this did end up working but it was a lot slower and it didn't stay flat like before now again in that paper from 1865 he tested several different ammonium salts and they all apparently worked just as well however for some reason ammonium nitrate seemed to destroy it so I tested this by adding a dilute solution of it the parts that it touched immediately started to shrink and when I added a whole bunch it murdered it just for good measure I tried adding more ammonium chloride afterwards but it didn't do anything for the other tests I tried cooling it down but now I want to see what happened if I heated it to do this I just blasted it with my heat gun for a bit and then I added the ammonium chloride I'm not sure how hot I got it but I think it was above 100 C because it sounded like some of the water boiled when it was added the high heat also caused the amalgam to die almost instantly and it barely grew at all so I tried it again but I didn't heat it for nearly as long this time I thought the reaction was a lot more interesting but it was still really short-lived I kept adding more ammonium chloride and it went through a few more growing and shrinking cycles but it eventually stopped working I wasn't really sure what to do with it at this point so I just tried blasting it with my heat gun I thought that it would destroy it relatively quickly kind of like when I added the ammonium nitrate and not too surprisingly it did cause it to decompose but it wasn't nearly as fast as I thought it would be now I honestly don't remember why but for some reason I decided to stop heating it and to try adding more ammonium chloride the moment it was added the bubbling slowed down quite a bit and it kind of looked like it froze however I'm not sure if this was actually because of the ammonium chloride or because the solution was just cold and it was cooling things down after a couple minutes it didn't really change in size so I started poking at it I honestly have no idea how to describe its texture because it wasn't like anything that I've ever felt before it was incredibly soft and there was very little resistance when I pushed on it but it was still strong enough to hold its shape it did slowly degrade though which was probably both natural and because I was constantly moving it around now the question is why did it freeze like this and why did this never happen with any of my other runs and the answer apparently like everything else in this video isn't something that I know somehow though it's still retaining a bit of its solid character and it's also holding on to a bunch of the gas it was a bit hard to tell here but when I pushed away the surface layer you can see that it was still filled with bubbles over the next few minutes though it all went back to being a liquid okay so that was everything that I tried with the liquid sodium amalgam and now I wanted to do it with the solid one I started by adding it to some ammonium chloride solution but the effect was pretty lame even after leaving it for a couple minutes it didn't really do much what was much more interesting was when the solution was added to it like I just been doing because it was solid it kept most of its shape as it expanded and reminded me a lot of those toys that grow when you leave them in water it very quickly maxed out in size though and then just like all the other times it degraded back to being a liquid but anyway I think this brings me to the end of the project when I first started there wasn't even a single photo of this amalgam online and I didn't really know what to expect however it turned out to be even more interesting than I thought it would be the debate now though is whether or not what's forming here is actually an amalgam over the years several tests have been conducted which strongly suggests that it is but as far as I know it has never been confirmed and unfortunately I don't think many people are putting in much effort to find out I'm personally on the side that some sort of ammonium amalgam does form and hopefully eventually we'll get a definitive answer last year I ran a short campaign where I sold some shirts and sweaters for the channel I think kind of forgot about selling t-shirts and other merge but for 2019 I've decided to actually get my act together so I opened up a shop on T spring and I reapplied that first design and if you're interested in picking up one of these there's a link in the description right now this is still the only design that I have but I am working on getting more for example for the next one I commissioned two drawing from a friend of mine it was inspired by the Pharaoh serpent demo which was one of the first videos that I did on this channel I think it turned out really well and I'm currently working on adapting it so that it looks as best as it can on a t-shirt I don't really know when it'll be released but it'll probably be sometime in late April as usual a big thanks 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 five dollars or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here [Music] [Music]

Channel: NileRed

Views: 1,276,259

Rating: 4.9482064 out of 5

Keywords: nile, red, science, chemistry, amalgam, mercury, sodium, ammonium, metal, nilered, sponge, liquid metal

Id: Hp9PIXOYaEA

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/1832jsh]

Since when is 500,000 not a large number?