#NileRed #video on extracting citric acid #materials from lemons. But, uh, he used lye, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, and calcium chloride to do it. So I’m guessing he’s going to precipitate the citric acid with the calcium citrate, wash it, then acidulate it with the hydrochloric acid? But then you have some unknown hydrochloric and citric acid in solution, plus calcium chloride. You can simpify this to just the acids by precipitating the calcium chloride with the sulfuric acid, but then you have super annoying calcium sulfate, and you still have to separate the hydrochloric acid, which I guess you could just boil off. But then what is the lye for? Let’s see.
Oh, he says he’s not going to actually use the hydochloric acid, so I guess he’s just going to acidulate the calcium citrate with the sulfuric acid, leaving insoluble calcium sulfate and citric and sulfuric acids, but then how do you separate those?
He got 458g of lemon juice (450mℓ) with a pH of 2–3 and then started adding lye to raise the pH to 8–9, which is not at all what I expected; that’s going to give sodium citrate, which is water-soluble, not a calcium-citrate precipitate. He says to fully neutralize an acidic proton, take the pH two points above its pKa, so 8.4 to neutralize the third citric-acid proton (pKa = 6.40); at this point the lemon juice is turning orange. He found that gravity filtration with coffee filters worked better than vacuum filtration because of the lemon pulp, because it’s easier to replace the clogged filters with fresh ones. Then he added the calcium chloride (28.5g dissolved in 70mℓ of distilled water) to the slightly basic solution, which I thought would immediately precipitate calcium citrate, but which needed to be heated to boiling to do so; then it settled, and he vacuum-filtered it and washed it three times with hot water, getting 77g of calcium citrate tetrahydrate. Then he added 20.9mℓ 98% sulfuric acid dissolved in 200mℓ of water; he uses a slight excess of the citrate to ensure that the sulfuric acid is fully consumed, so that the calcium sulfate waste product is contaminated with a bit of calcium citrate, rather than the citric acid desired product being contaminated with a bit of sulfuric acid. He commented that the vacuum filtering process was “kind of slow”, which is a lot less hassle than filtering calcium sulfate usually is. So then he evaporated the water from the 350mℓ of citric acid filtrate at 70°–80° with strong stirring, where I was expecting him to boil it; on reduction to about 70mℓ, he filtered it through a coffee filter to remove a precipitate he thought was calcium citrate that had remained dissolved. On gradual evaporation at room temperature for a couple of weeks, it crystallized; some “viscous brown goop” was left as a supernatant, presumably containing some kind of impurities. Also, he thinks that some of the crystals aren’t citric acid. But he got 18.1g of a theoretical yield of 21.9g.
on 02026-08-24#Nile-Red on #video about how buying a big separatory funnel got him a call from the RCMP. #human-rights
on 02026-01-03#NileRed #Youtube video replicating the "bulletproof wood" #materials paper. He had to keep checking the pH when rinsing the wood to find out when he’d removed all the lye, which took 7 (one-hour?) washings. The result was not bulletproof at all the first time around, not stopping even a pellet. Later iterations improved somewhat but still yielded to .22 LR, though with two layers glued together and rotated 90°, the bullet was stopped. Three layers didn’t even splinter on the back side and was able to stop a 9mm bullet.
on 02025-05-20#NileRed #video copying #kiwami-japan’s bismuth knife
on 02025-02-26#video by #NileRed on making pop-rocks candy by bubbling CO₂ under pressure into candy as it cools
on 02024-11-03#NileRed #video about metal glass #materials, specifically Vitreloy 1, an alloy of zirconium (41.2 mol%), beryllium (“the asbestos of metals”, 22.5%), titanium (13.8%), copper (12.5%), and nickel (10%). Shows how to make a lab-scale arc melter from a common arc welding power supply! Tungsten electrode, water-cooled copper crucible, argon-filled glass chamber. But he ended up buying one on AliBaba instead; the final price was US$14440, including US$1570 of freight. Vitreloy 1 vitrifies when cooling even as slowly as 1°/s, so the water-cooled copper crucible was enough. Really astonishing viscous glassy goo behavior at 36'43", like sugar syrup instead of any metal I’ve ever seen. (It also shatters like glass when he cuts it with bolt cutters). He found suction casting of the Vitreloy to be very difficult, as on his first four attempts the metal didn’t fill the mold at all. On his fifth attempt, with 30% more metal, he successfully cast a metal disc, and similarly on attempts 6, 7, and 8. But then it wasn’t insanely bouncy like he expected, a problem he was able to fix with superglue. Video has a comment by “jaskaran_singh_saini” saying, “The metallic glasses I invented have been the most recent major advancement in this area. (...) The thing Nile mentioned about the metallic glass not being safe to grind and polish because of beryllium is not true. Once the beryllium has been absorbed into the metal matrix, it is very safe. I literally produced thousands of these metallic glasses in my lab during my PhD, and some in very big sizes and they are all safe.”
on 02024-09-02#video by #NileRed explaining the Tollens silvering process. His Tollens reagent recipe is 17g silver nitrate (homemade), 2.4g soda lye, and 9mℓ concentrated ammonia: 1ℓ 0.1M AgNO₃, gravity filtration through three or four coffee filters, measure off 150mℓ, add 9mℓ ammonia solution, which with stirring soon complexes away the precipitated silver oxide into the desired diamminesilver complex; then dumps in the 2.4g of lye, and on stirring again the silver oxide precipitated dissolves. Warns of the danger of degradation to silver nitride if not used immediately, which gave some brown discoloration after a few minutes. For the mirror demonstration he shakes this at room temperature for several minutes with 1g dextrose, suggesting that a hot water bath would accelerate it. #materials #bootstrapping
on 02024-07-0277-minute #video about #NileRed’s life story. He says his motivation is that he can make things he can’t buy, like bromine, which was similar to his motivation for “urbexing”, exploring abandoned buildings in Montreal to get photos of their interiors. He’s thinking he might like to be a “real” filmmaker. How he decided to stop studying for medical school after he volunteered in a hospital for a while. Lots about the headaches of running a company, even a YouTube production company, and having people depend on you. Financial prospects of different careers. He initially hired his brother for what he had been making at Walmart, US$2000 a month (or CAD 2000?), while he was taking home US$1000 a month for himself, because he was living with his parents. The burdens of fame, no longer being able to be anonymous in public. Mostly just talking heads, but at least they’re talking to each other instead of just talking to a camera.
on 02024-05-21