Looks like it's working at least it's doing something.
(Intro music)
Hi everyone welcome back Cody's lab
so in today's video I want to try making a
metal that is used in everything from
pop cans to airplanes and I want to try
sourcing it from natural materials that
I can dig out of the ground on the ranch
and that metal is aluminum now the only
problem with that is i live here in the
Great Basin and most of our rocks here
are limestone now in order to form in
ore that i could easily extract
aluminum from I'm going to have to have
material that started off as being
granite or another feldspar containing
rock and then that rock must be
weathered chemically weathered by acidic
rainwater for a very long time
eventually that would turn into clay.
Now we do have materials here that resemble
clay you go down to the Great Salt Lake
you got that sticky material that
everyone calls clay but it's really not
clay 'cause if you try to make bricks out of
it and the fire it will fall apart
because once again it's made mostly of
lime and lime breaks down when you heat
it is just not the right material
same particle size is why it feels the same
but it's not clay.
And even if we do have
sources of clay here the problem is then
that clay is not really the thing we're
looking for because it contains way too
much silica it does have a lot of
aluminum in it but clay is formed from
aluminum silicates and you really need
something that has a very high
concentration of aluminum otherwise it's
not worth your time to extract in order
to go from clay material its high, or higher,
in aluminum you've got to continue to
weather it and leach that silica out
with more and more rain water. Now you're
going to need a flat surface, warm
temperatures, and a lot of time, and that
usually does not happen this far north
it usually happens in the tropics that's
why most mines that produce the raw
materials for aluminum are down in
the tropical regions so in order to get
some material that i can actually
process and extract aluminum from i'm
going to have to find something with the
highest aluminum content that i can and
so I've come up here to one of my mining
claims you see up here in the distance
you can see the rocks up there are kind
of covered in snow but there's a little
bit of a twist in the rocks because
there's actually a fault there it's a
thrust fault he goes up like this and
that actually happened before these
mountains formed so that faults not
really active anymore
the mountains of since risen up and the
rocks have moved around since but the fault
is still there and that fault was active
from millions years. Old faults like this
tend to contain large concentration of
minerals and that is why there's a mine
right here. The mine was dug directly
into the fault you can see the fault
right there
you've got some bioturbated
silica-rich limestone here it's
chert nodules in the limestone and
over here we have shale there's a little
bit of sandstone right here interbedded
with shale now shale was actually laid
down in a tropical region in fact the
limestone was as well. 500 million years
ago this was a shallow sea and we had
water coming off of mountains which were
granitic and they contained all the
materials to create these rocks the
carbonates were pulled out of the water
by marine animals and when they died
their skeletons piled up forming the
limestone but any clays that were
washed into the sea
settled down to form shale. Now you may
know something about shale and that's
that it's very flaky see how i can just
pull it apart by my hands it's very soft
flaky and it's in sheets and what happens is
when the clay packs down on the bottom
of the sea it squeezes the water out and
the aluminum silicate sheets line
up with each other and form these flaky
shale rocks.
Now, if you weather shale you react it with
water once again it's fairly easy to
turn back into clay in fact many places
that do produce brick especially here in
the western United States usually start
with shale they spread it out so the
water can get to it and they form clay
now here because this is a fault line if
a lot of water is actually able to get
to the shale and so clay is formed
rather rapidly and it's also ground up
by the motion of the earth
But there's one more thing
the water here is acidic and so the clay
is also weathered even further
ok so here we are the moisture content
in here is kind of high so it may fog up
the camera but if we look up here you can
actually see the fault and where
material has fallen down from it.
Now this material here that is broken up by
the fault is called gouge and since we
are in a section of this where a lot of
the gouge contains shale, the shale is
actually weathered into this clay
material here. Now I've actually done
some tests on this quite a while ago
we had an assay done on it and the aluminum
content of this was quite high, higher
than most clays that I've ever seen in fact.
That's because this clay is sitting
here for millions of years and
groundwater is flowed through this fault
acidified by minerals in the rock and
has further weathered the clay into
something which is close to bauxite as I
could probably possibly find.
so clay is comprised of aluminum silicate but when
the silica is weathered out now
this does take a long time because as
you may suspect glass bottles do not
dissolve in water very quickly but the
aluminum oxide is far less soluble than
even the silica so over time the silica
is preferentially weathered
out leaving behind the aluminum oxide
let's grab us a nice sample of this
I think this one would be nice
let's go home and see if I can get the aluminum out.
Well okay, heh heh, shouldn't have poured hot water there
last time so here's my sample of clay
here now I need to crush this up to make a
slurry in order to do any useful
chemistry with it so let's wrap it in a rag
smash it with a metal brick
(Thudding sounds and occasional clink of metal on stone)
Okay
now i have clay powder which I will now mix
with some warm water to dissolve it into a slurry.
This step is mostly to get out
the large pieces of rock and other
contaminants that are not clay just
slowly pour this out and I'll leave the
bottom portion in place as you see
that's mostly gravel and sand so now I've
got a slurry of clay in my bucket.
so the elements I have here listed by mass are
oxygen, silicon, aluminum, hydrogen, because
it's mostly water, and then you've got
your trace elements such as iron,
titanium, magnesium, et cetera, now industrially
the way that they isolate the alumina is
to dissolve everything in hot
concentrated lye solution. The sodium
hydroxide dissolves both the alumina and
the silica but not the iron and some
other elements
the only problem is that alumina is
only soluble in sodium hydroxide at very
high temperatures around 200 degrees
Celsius in order to achieve that I would
have to seal it and pressurize the
mixture. That process for me is going to
be a little bit inefficient and to be
honest I've got enough people calling
the ATF on my behalf saying that I've
been making pipe bombs so rather than
that i'm going to just empty this into
this crock pot here so I can get it out of the
leaky bucket and then I'm just going to
add in some hydrochloric acid
now hydrochloric acid will dissolve the
alumina it will not dissolve silica
unfortunately the hydrochloric acid will
dissolve iron and possibly the titanium
as well but they'll be in concentrations
that slow enough for me to deal with
let's just put a bunch of that in there
and i'm going to plug in this crock pot
and heat it up for a little while until
the alumina has had a good chance to
dissolve into the hydrochloric acid
now this has had some time to cook and
remove this lid I'm going to pour most
of this off especially this semi-clear
liquid at the top into this other jug.
now what I should have in the liquid is a
dilute solution of aluminum chloride and
apparently some hydrochloric acid
Oh, come on and what's left in here should be
primarily the silica and there
might be a little bit of aluminum left
if there was any a crystalline aluminum
oxide the hydrochloric acid would have a hard time
dissolving it so I added a little bit of
extra water to this to help it wash out
the aluminum chloride as you can see the
material here is a lot lighter in color
that's because the hydrochloric acid has
dissolved away a lot of the iron.
so now this is settled out a little bit let's
open this jug back up
let's pour off this clarified solution
into this glass over here so now i should
have primarily aluminum chloride, little
bit of iron and whatever else the
hydrochloric acid dissolved maybe
magnesium and stuff
probably not a whole lot of titanium but
that's also a possibility now to my
orange juice looking fluid i'm going to
add in a little bit more lye
this will neutralize the hydrochloric
acid making the solution more alkaline
and then what will happen to the
aluminum chloride is it will precipitate
from solution as aluminum
hydroxide so I think we're getting
somewhere
think i'm very close you can see a
brownish mud forming and if I pull some
of this out of there
yes it is a gelatinous material that
looks like a little hydroxide to me it
looks like it is contaminated with stuff
the green coloring I'd say is probably
the iron yeah it's gonna be kind of hard
to get rid of all that iron and it's not
too bad i can still work with it I think
fortunately iron hydroxide is roughly
7,000 times more soluble than aluminum
oxide so I could pretty easily separate
the two just by rinsing with copious
amounts of water
let's stir this in
let it settle and repeat so this is what
I'm left with after washing several
times in water this is my aluminum
hydroxide here and that is very goopy still
there's not a whole lot here but
there we go that's my product now I
gotta dry this out and heat it up to a
thousand degrees Celsius to calcine it
and remove all the moisture all the
hydrogen from it
leaving me with pure aluminum oxide or
alumina get the furnace out
ok so I've got into graphite crucible
here
tip it out
there presumably is my alumina here's a
little bit better shot of my aluminum
oxide yeah feels about right
this would be a good that polishing
compound here 'cause it's in a fine powder
but it's also a very hard material
yeah alright so now i think i'm going to
use electrolysis just like they do it
industrially to produce the pure aluminum
metal it's starting to snow on me
so you might be aware that aluminum
oxide like this has a very high melting
point and in order to do electrolysis on
it i'm gonna have to have it in a liquid
state now to do that I'm going to mix it
with some crydite this material here is
sodium aluminum fluoride this is a
naturally occurring mineral but it's so
rare that the only samples of that I've
ever seen was in the museum so i had to
buy this but it's a pretty easy to make
if you have hydrofluoric acid you just
react the hydrofluoric acid with the
aluminum oxide and what this does is
going to mix with the aluminum oxide
lowering the melting point is something
that I can actually handle now the
cryolite really isn't used up in the
reaction it can be recycled over and
over again so I'm not really too worried
about buying it like I did
so here's the plan
I have this fajita pan here hooked
to the negative electrode and I've got
the positive electrode to this carbon
rod here you can see they conduct
electricity
I've got it hooked to a 6-volt 40 amp
source but I can change that if I need
to now for the gases that are gonna be
produced from this reaction you're
probably primarily going to have oxygen
and carbon dioxide and the carbon is
going to come from the rod has it reacts
with the oxygen now there's also the
potential to form carbon monoxide as well
as hydrogen fluoride that's why I've got
this fan here blowing the air away
alright so let's pull this out
see if we can do it looks like its
molten good sign
shut down
there's electricity
doesn't seem to be producing much
reaction
let's see the problem is I'm not let's turn
up the current
yeah it's like my carbon rod is just
cooling the crydite to it it's not
actually getting good electrical contact
there so I'm going to try this again if
you have to preheat the rod so this time
I've preheated everything in the furnace
see the rod is now red-hot
see if I can get ahold of this without
causing an arc all right looks like it's
working
there we go
that's the way
get this camera in a little closer I guess
(Electric buzzing of arcs forming)
It looks like it's working or at least it's doing something
I put electricity through it for quite a
while presumably there might be some
aluminum metal in there
let's put it back in the furnace and melt
this all up once again and I'll pour it
out and see what I've got after several
days worth of work
That's not good!
Ah! Got some shiny bits
ok
there's definitely a little ball of
something right there let's set this aside
for now looks like there might be some more
little balls inside of the slag the
biggest ones right there it is that looks
like a shiny piece of metal to me
oh man
it actually worked obviously I didn't
make very much but that's something
here's my two beads of metal you see
they're quite shiny and they feel very light
that is just more confirmation that
this is indeed aliminum. that's awesome
actually was able to pull it off
who else do you know has made aluminum from
scratch at home
that's awesome. So hope y'all enjoyed
i'll see you next time
so today I want to try making aluminum
otherwise pronounced as aluminium or how
i will try to from now on aluminum just
to mess with everyone now aluminum is a
very reactive material it loves to bind
together with oxygen that's why thermite
is so energetic in order to extract it
is very difficult even though it's one
of the more common minerals in the
Earth's crust
however not in my area unfortunately you
see the rocks behind me are calcium
carbonate they were put down at the
bottom of a shallow sea back in the
Mississippian era from corals and stuff