Basic copper carbonate has a wide variety of uses.
It can be used as a precursor to a lot of other copper salts,
as a pigment or a dye,
or even to control the growth and spread of aquatic weeds.
For me though. I am not going to be using it for any of these
and I'm actually going to be using it as a catalyst in a chemical reaction.
For this preparation we only needed two things: copper sulfate pentahydrate and sodium carbonate.
The copper sulfate was purchased online from eBay
and the sodium carbonate was made from sodium bicarbonate in a previous video.
The procedure for this video was taken directly from a Doug's Lab video,
so if you like this one,
you should definitely check out his channel.
Lately I've been using him as a reference a lot
and following his procedures,
so I definitely think he deserves some love from you guys.
Anyway with that being said,
I'll leave a link to his basic copper carbonate video in the description
and we can move on to the chemistry.
256g of copper sulfate pentahydrate
was weighed out and added to a flask.
On top of the copper sulfate,
I then poured in about 700mL of distilled water.
I pick up the flask and swirl the contents
to try to mix everything up as much as possible,
but a lot still remains undissolved.
In order to dissolve everything,
we're going to have to heat it up,
so I turn on the hot plate and start the magnetic stirring.
While this is stirring and heating,
I move on to preparing our sodium carbonate solution.
In the beaker on the right,
I weighed out about 96g of sodium carbonate,
and I added about 200mL of distilled water.
To the sodium carbonate solution,
I also add a stir bar,
I turn on the stirring and I crank up the heat.
Now we just have to wait for the solutions to heat up
and for everything to dissolve.
It didn't take long for the copper sulfate solution to become clear
and for everything to dissolve,
but it seemed like the sodium carbonate solution was having trouble.
Even though the solution was boiling,
it was still cloudy and there was clearly some chunks left,
so I went ahead and added a bit more water.
Shortly after adding the water,
the sodium carbonate solution cleared up
and now we're ready to move on to the next step.
The next step in this preparation is very simple.
All we do is we pour the sodium carbonate solution into the copper sulphate solution.
The moment the sodium carbonate solution
hits the copper sulphate solution, a precipitate appears.
A very nice light blue precipitate floats to the surface
and a lot of bubbling occurs.
What's happening here is that copper sulfate, sodium carbonate and water
all react together to form our basic copper carbonate, sodium sulfate and CO₂ gas.
The basic copper carbonate that we form is insoluble in water
and that's the precipitate that you see,
and all of the bubbling is due to the formation of the CO₂.
I purposely added the sodium carbonate slowly and in small portions
to prevent the reaction from foaming out of the flask.
Each time the bubbling seem to be slowing down,
I added a little bit more sodium carbonate.
After all of the sodium carbonate had been added,
I mixed it around and then I let it sit there for a few hours.
Very quickly after putting it down on the hot plate,
you can see the copper carbonate starting to sink to the bottom.
I actually thought it looked kind of cool
where copper carbonate was sinking down but CO₂ bubbles were floating up.
One thing to point out is if you actually look at the water here,
it's still a little bit blue,
which means that there's some copper sulfate left over.
When we come back to the reaction a few hours later,
you can see that the water is colorless now,
which means that all of the copper sulfate has been used.
Now we're ready to move on and to separate the basic copper carbonate,
we carry out a vacuum filtration.
This is very easy to do and I simply just add the basic copper carbonate,
filter off the water and just keep adding over and over
until I filtered everything.
After everything's added to the filter,
I washed the flask a few times with a little bit of water.
I carry out a few washing steps
where I use a metal spatula and mix around the basic copper carbonate
to really just try to wash out
any copper sulfate or sodium carbonate that might remain.
After I wash it a few times,
I leave the vacuum on to pull out as much water as possible.
After a few minutes,
it's relatively dry and we're left with a semi-wet paste.
I scraped the copper carbonate
out of the filter funnel and onto a watch glass.
I do my best to remove as much as possible
but there's inevitably going to be a little bit that's left behind.
Once I've transferred as much as I can to the watch glass,
I use the metal spatula
to chop up the big pieces and spread it out.
I more or less leave it like this with occasional mixing
to let it air dry and get rid of as much water as possible.
Just after a few days it was dry enough
that I was easily able to powderize it
using the back of the spatula,
and I was left with a relatively fine powder.
The final yield was 120g
which is actually a little bit above theoretical,
so this means it's probably still a little bit wet.
Just as a side note,
the basic copper carbonate is not soluble in water,
and we have to clean it with an acid like hydrochloric acid.
The acid will react with the basic copper carbonate
and convert the copper back into a soluble form.
I filled the filter flask with a bunch of concentrated hydrochloric acid,
and then I poured in some water on top.
I just let it sit like this for a while
and let it react with as much of the copper carbonate as possible.
As it reacts with the copper carbonate in the filter,
it releases CO₂
and these are the bubbles you see floating up.
Anyway, that's all I really have to say
about making the basic copper carbonate,
and like I said earlier
you're going to see me use it
in a future video to make pyridine.
I actually haven't done this yet,
but I would like to give a big thanks to all of my Patreon supporters.
You guys are extremely important to me
and you're one of the major reasons why
my videos are even possible to make.
I've changed the reward tiers a little bit
and I've made it so that if you spend five dollars or more,
I will include your name as a personal thanks at the end of each video.
I'm going to try to read out the names but don't kill me if I mispronounce any of them.
A special thanks goes out to Paul Anderson, LVE,
Eric Steinberg, Jan Beck, Victor Gonzalez,
John Libal and Kris Palkovich.
On top of you guys,
I actually have a lot of other $5+ supporters,
but I didn't include them because I'm not sure
if they want their name included at the end of the video.
I've sent a message to each of you on Patreon
just asking if you do want your name to appear,
because after all you did not opt to be in any of the reward tiers.