I've never seen it do that before
normally the shatters or it just about
holds but I've never seen a holy
experiment like this we're going to show
you an organometallic so organometallic
just means that there's carbon bonded to
a metal our metal today is aluminium and
we're going to take the single simplest
carbon containing unit which is a methyl
group ch3 so tri methyl aluminium is
actually the world's largest tonnage
organometallic it's quite hard to get
accurate numbers but it's at least
10,000 tonnes per year and you think hey
that's a useful compound it could we
should be able to do some chemistry of
that both in the lab and on industrial
scale but unfortunately the compound has
one or two problems are associated with
it and we're going to show you that by
attempting to try and weigh out some tri
methyl aluminium in air so I've got a
syringe here and we've got it contained
within this canister I'm wearing gloves
for reasons that will become fairly
obvious there's going to be a little bit
of faffing around here while we get this
opened up in a safe way I'm filling the
syringe full of an inert gas we're using
argon today argon is completely
unreactive I'll just turn that sound off
so I flushed the syringe three times
with argon and now that should mean that
we can pick up some tri methyl aluminium
with comparative safety so we go down
into this cannister and I'm just going
to take a little bit and then I'm going
to pull this up like so now there may be
a slight flame as this comes out the end
there it is right so why can't you way
out trimethylammonium in air well let's
have a look here's some in air and as
you can see the compounds spontaneously
catching fire as we dump it and in fact
I've put about two grams of tri methyl
aluminium there that's burning with
about the same energy as a one-bar
electric fire at about the same rate and
so you've heard the glass crack there
that's the energy coming out of there so
the trimethyl aluminium
has a very weak carbon two aluminium
bond the bonds that aluminium forms with
oxygen are incredibly strong so we're
getting a massive transfer of methyl to
a burnt flame and I think if I pick this
up you can see this is now the severely
damaged and that's due to the heat that
was merely generated by turning all of
those weak carbon aluminium bonds into
really strong carbon oxygen bonds so you
can see a little bit of aluminium oxide
left that's the same as you would find I
guess in a variety of grinding powders
or indeed in common abrasives it was in
the extreme heat when we reached about
500 degrees C the thermal shock on the
gras glass cracking it so I don't know
about you viewers today whether you'd
like to weigh that out in air without
special precautions
there's the compound in air we're just
going to release this slowly we're going
to see a bright yellow flame and
oxidation so going on one three two one
okay
Tromaville aluminium is actually a
critical additive in making the
polymerization of the monomers that are
bound in our modern society so the next
time you pick up a plastic shopping bag
or a black refuse sack or a piece of
plastic Tupperware there's a good job
that that's come from a catalytic
process that will have involved one of
the other metals in the periodic table
titanium but that will be completely
inert until we start to mix in some try
metal aluminium so it's what is known as
a co promoter so if you encounter
polypropylene you can see that on the
back of your recycling thing you'll see
PP is a good chance that that's come out
of an aluminium promoted catalyst
professor you just showed me what 2
grand
it looks like how does industry deal
with tons and tons of it well you've got
to be pretty careful and you saw that we
had a metal canister here it's sealed
it's under argon so you need to pipe
this liquid around you need to build
specialist apparatus specialist plants
and they can cost many millions of euros
or pounds or dollars whatever you would
like to put together so there's a great
lot of this material but it's remarkably
underutilized in many other chemical
applications five four three two one
zero
we have onto the Terrier Oriole one zero
one zero launch of the first Terrier
improved Orion c2 ROA after watching us
with no life you see it
there's the TM a release on your screen
so about ten years ago we set ourselves
the challenge of saying can we develop a
stabilized version of try lethal
aluminium that's able to be worked with
by still experienced chemist but not
without the the rather profound danger
that we've already seen so what we're
going to show you now so an identical
watch glass yeah here's our compound
that we developed about ten years ago
this is now marketed commercially this
tri methyl aluminium so there's the bit
we've already seen and then it's got
this die either by cyclo to-to-to octane
adder and that's so much of a mouthful
we just call this compound a bow because
that's much easier to say if you
remember the flames you should be
worried when I'm going to take the top
off here and I can see a little bit of
the fear in your eyes but if you see
here now well it's a whole new ballgame
just by making the a duct instead of
having a liquid we've got a white powder
its crystalline its free-flowing I'm
only going to put a little bit down here
because I kind of don't want my watch
glass to crack but as you can see even
if you are a relatively inexperienced
chemist that's much easier to work with
now although this is kinetically
stabilized it still got all of the
potential power to make those very
strong aluminium to oxygen bonds for
this one I'm going to give it a little
bit of fuel so I'm going to cheat by
taking a little bit of tissue this
tissue happens to be blue as opposed to
your normal white tissue but I'm going
to move that out the way and so I guess
that looks okay about a spoonful I'm
going to put it on the paper like so so
again no major reaction thank you down
for that we need to get just the right
of amount of water in it to initiate
directions I'm just putting a few drops
and what I'm hoping is that that will
run through the capillary there you go
so we do get a fire out of it but I
guess you probably could manage with
that fire and it's nowhere near the same
horrific quantity of energy you can see
getting very hot in the middle so I
strongly advise you to
do this on the end of your finger
because it would cause severe burns 3 2
1
and I'll be cleaning Mel's line
afterwards so the black suits you can
see is actually the carbon that's been
produced in the flame process so we've
exceeded up to carbon dioxide but we
also produced a little bit of graphite
there that's unusual actually I've not
noticed that before so but we don't
normally spray the stuff around the lab
but obvious safety reasons
sorry ma'am yeah yes on for dame up sigh
and say you just have to clean it up