Greetings fellow nerds.
Finally, ten months of research and experimentation have brought us to this point,
how to make glow in the dark phosphorescent powder at home.
We're also going to use an interesting technique called microwave combustion synthesis.
We've already made a lot of the precursors in previous videos.
I've listed them all with links in the video description.
So let's get started.
First, in a clean glass container, measure out 1.875g of ultra-pure aluminum nitrate nonahydrate.
Then add in 530mg of crushed ultra-pure strontium nitrate.
Now for the hard part, add in exactly 10.7mg of europium nitrate pentahydrate.
You'll need a high precision analytical balance for this,
alternatively you can make standard solutions.
Now add in exactly 21.9mg of dysprosium nitrate pentahydrate,
once again I recommend an analytical balance.
Finally add in 30.9mg of boric acid.
Now add in 3 mL of distilled water and shake until completely dissolved,
this is going to take awhile since we're very close to saturation.
I'll skip over this part.
In the meantime you'll need pure Urea.
Before you get any stupid ideas and start pissing all over your lab,
this source of urea is NOT pure enough for our purposes.
Instead, find an instant cold pack that has urea as its primary ingredient.
Here is the pure urea beads.
Exactly how they make this I don't know and to be brutally honest, I don't want to know.
Now take the urea and add 3.9 grams to the nitrate solution.
Shake it up until it's completely dissolved.
Now for the fun part, combustion synthesis.
Now you could heat it directly until it ignites, and while this is impressive,
I found this method to be unreliable and produced very low quality product.
Commercial glow powder is made by a special furnace at 1300 degrees Celsius in a hydrogen nitrogen atmosphere.
Since i don't have such a furnace, and can't yet make one,
I'm going to substitute it with a microwave.
So here I am outside with a new sample.
Place the vial in another glass container, this is to contain the product after it combusts.
But don't pour the solution into the larger container,
it spreads out and I found it much less reliable to ignite such a thin layer of liquid.
Now take it over to the microwave.
Oh yeah, do not use your microwave for food after this,
it will become contaminated.
Best get a used microwave just for your lab and don't use it for anything else.
Alright here we are at the microwave,
just pop it in there and microwave at full power for four minutes.
Get far away from it.
Ya know, I just realized this might be the first time on YouTube
where we use a microwave to create something rather than destroy it.
Anyway, this is why it must be done outside or in a fumehood.
You can see a cloud of smoke coming from the reaction.
Eventually, the sample will ignite and combust.
Right about now.
Did you miss it? Let me show you again at night so you can see it better.
And that's microwave combustion synthesis.
While the danger of an explosion that blasts the door off the microwave is very low,
I still don't recommend standing in front of it while it's working.
Also, if you see anything unusual, like it's glowing continuously due to melting glass,
pull the plug on the microwave and stop the experiment,
having an extension cord like this is the safest way to achieve that.
Anyway, back to the chemistry, here we are half an hour later after the sample has cooled.
And there it is.
OK so it doesn't look pretty but this is the stuff.
Let me get it back to the lab for analysis.
Here it is, I've transferred it to a clean vial, now lets see if it glows.
I'm shining an ultraviolet light at it, now I'm pointing away and it is glowing.
We have successfully created phosphorescent glow powder,
entirely from chemicals we could easily buy or make ourselves.
Now let's do some analysis on this stuff.
First thing to do is mess around with the composition and see what happens.
So this first sample here I made using flame ignition rather than microwaving.
As you can see it works but it seems to have more dead flakes than the other sample.
This sample was made without dysprosium, as you can see, it dies within seconds.
No persistence of glow with this one.
Now I didn't show it here, but the one I made without europium had no glow at all.
Now this sample is my best work, and the procedure for it is the one I showed in the video.
As you can see it's bright, has fewer dead flakes, and lasts much longer.
OK this sample was made using impure chemicals, tap water, and no recrystallization.
As you can see, purity is key, because this impure stuff is terrible.
Now this sample was made using more dysprosium and europium metals to try and increase brightness and lifetime.
As you can see, there is no difference.
So adding in more of the rare earth metals only improves glow up to a point,
after which there is no more gain.
Now let's look at this stuff under the microscope.
As you can see, the morphology isn't uniform.
We have some parts that look like melted glass,
other parts that look like foam and some parts a rougher and more powdery appearance.
Turning off the lights we can see the glow is not uniform
and there appears to be some link between the morphology and the glow properties.
Eventually I plan to study what that link is.
Now for the most important analysis, the longevity test and comparison to commercial glow powder.
So I have my best sample on the right.
And this here is the commercially available glow powder I bought online.
Now since it's such a fine powder,
for a fair comparison I crushed some of my own powder to create an equally fine powder.
Already you can see my stuff doesn't quite measure up.
Let's first charge up all the powders for ten minutes with UV light.
Now kill the lights and time-lapse the video.
Now before you ask, the glow lasts for about ten minutes of bright glow that you see here,
and several hours of a much dimmer afterglow which my camera cannot record.
Anyway you can see that my glow powder falls short of the commercial powder.
But if we look at the raw flakes on the right we can see why.
My stuff is not uniform and has a lot of dead flakes
that when crushed and mixed in reduce the average brightness of the powder.
But there are some flakes that are just as bright as the commercial powder
and as time progresses, we're seeing they're lasting just as long.
So the objective now is to try and make higher quality powder that's more uniform with less dead flakes.
I'm doing a lot of experimentation and I also hope to make different colors as well.
I'll post the results of my progress when I find something interesting.
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