Turning Fertilizers Into Pure Chemicals
Vložit
- čas přidán 25. 05. 2024
- In this video I convert the fertilizer calcium ammonium nitrate to pure calcium nitrate.
I then purify urea fertilizer and ammonium sulfate fertilizer using a few basic techniques.
This was done on a patreon request, and by request of a few people in the comments of my ammonium nitrate video who wanted a pure source of calcium nitrate for one of the methods I showed.
#chemistry #science #hydrogen #gas #elements #fire #chemical #industury #color
Somewhere there is one guy who supplies brown oily sludge to fertiliser manufacturers
I don't know why, but I laugh at this.
Brown stuff is used to cut the product so that no-one overdoes 😉
The brown stuff is lignosulfamide it's a waste product from turning wood into paper pulp. Yup they sell it at almost giveaway prices to fertilizer manufactures as an anti-caking agent and dispersal aid. 😂
Very cool dude. I’ve always been fascinated with the efflorescence phenomenon. It is curious that more salts don’t do this but quite a few can. Evaporation pools for mineral milling can grow some wacky crusts and things.
This sort of nature deposition is my favorite because of the fractal like geometry of the resulting crystals. I always get annoyed by badly created patterns like tiles or that awful carved brick thing and especially when it had parts that are consistent. These even when it doesn’t perfectly form it follows a consistent set of rules so it is self-similar no matter how close you “zoom” in.
Thanks man! And yeah up until this project I'd always been annoyed by the effervescence phenomenon, but seeing it go so far (and even start to go across my table) did spark a bit of interest in this as a way to make some potentially beautiful structures.
Found out recently this also happens with the relatively expensive terbium sulfate, and since terbium salts glow bright green under 365nm UV it was quite beautiful to see
@@integral_chemistry yeah it’s wild. I’ve seen it climb across a counter. There was a salt lamp in a bathroom at a hotel I was at and it was migrating 🤣
Potassium ferrocyanate does this, too.
Miss your channel full modern
This will come in handy, greetings from Ireland
Greetings! Glad you found it useful, and I've always wanted to visit Ireland
Oh no here we go again
Come out ye black and tans
Many of the commercial fertilizers have fillers and trace dyes so that in the event they were used to make boom producing devices they could be traced back to a brand/manufacturer to aid in finding out where they were bought. Not to mention that as it’s fertilizer grade they don’t have to strive for purity and a lot of garbage can find its way into it
Very nice! Personally, if I was working with calcium ammonium nitrate, I would boil it with crystal lye to get sodium nitrate, which should crystallize a lot more easily (or maybe KOH, since potassium nitrate has an even sharper solubility curve). Or I'd just add sulfuric acid and distill off the nitrate as nitric acid. Either way, great video!
Thanks man! Yeah the calcium nitrate from CAN was done on a specific request, and I agree not the best usage imo. Initially this vid was just going to be this one conversion, but since that felt too short I added the other two "cleanups". In retrospect, though, it might have been cooler to do a CAN-only video where I show how to make it into HNO3, KNO3, AN, etc.
I love the time-lapse shots. You should see if you can get a very close-up time-lapse of the crystals. 😮
I thought i was the only one who does this. You get different crystals at different concentrations and temperatures. Also fire extinguishers have near pure mono Ammonium phosphate.
Try purifying stump remover for KNO3
A good addition would be a tree of useful things we can do with these materials.
Damn that is a really good idea! Now I feel dumb for not including something like that.. I could always link other projects that utilize these chemicals, but not quite the same as creating a visual in-video
@@integral_chemistry Do not feel this way. It's just a hunch and a lucky strike. Your video is great.
@Leandro_ thanks man! It is a good idea though, maybe I could do a standalone "uses of common chemicals" video where I link this one along with other similar purification videos I've done
@@integral_chemistry oooh, do nitromethane.
Great job! The final products looked far purer than the beginning products!
I love this kind of stuff, I recently got a bag of “muriate of potash” and purified it for a chlorate cell. Read the labels on products, there’s a lot of cool stuff available that way. I tend to convert CAN to AN which is more useful for the kind of stuff I do though.
I'm glad you liked it! Figured this video would have a more limited audience than usual, but this kind of thing was the first thing I really did when I started doing chemistry as a hobby and it is quite fun to find useful chemicals in places you wouldn't expect.. and yeah I usually go the ammonium nitrate route as well, and I actually bought thus bag of CAN initially for my "Ammonium nitrate 3 ways" video.
Although in retrospect, I used CAN to make AN in that video by reaction with ammonium sulfate.. ammonium carbonate would have been better
@@integral_chemistry ammonium sulfate is easier to find, usually at the same store as the CAN so that’s how I usually go about it. I just got a bunch of extremely cool chemicals from backyard science 2000 so I’ll hopefully have some cool videos coming up. I really need to finish the arsenic project, life has been hectic and it’s taking longer than I expected.
Unfortunately, calcium ammonium nitrate is also banned for private individuals in the EU due to the high ammonium nitrate content.
The only privately permitted and not yet monitored nitrate fertilizer is ammonium sulfate nitrate - but you can only get it online and not in hardware stores. Pure calcium nitrate can also be obtained from this by adding calcium hydroxide. However, it is no fun to filter off the clayey gypsum and drive out even more ammonia from the filtrate. The yield of calcium nitrate in the filtrate is comparatively low (less than 20%). But what else do you want to do if you want to remain an innocent citizen? 😕
it really makes me sad how poorly EU treats home and hobby chemists because of senseless fearmongering. I wish there was a solution for y'all, even if it was something like being allowed to rent lab space with included chemical access from a licensed company or university, provided that the chems never leave the lab.
Huh.. I'm so used to getting a notification when you comment, surprised I didn't this time.. Also I find it strange that most of the chemicals I can't get here in the US always end up coming from Poland. I've purchased perchlorates, chlorates, nitrites, nitrates, WFNA, Mg powder, calcium carbide, percarbonates, etc. all from Poland. I wonder if these laws just aren't enforced there.. Sorry you have to deal with that, it seems maddening.
On that note, I've found that most chemistry CZcamsrs aren't US-based. It seems Germany, Australia, and Canada really dominate when it comes to online chemistry, which really surprises me given the ease of access of chemicals here. Only US-based channels I've found apart from myself are Chemiolis and nomcopter labs.
Efflorescence can be halted by applying a ring of Vaseline to the rim of the beaker.
Oh damn! I can't believe I've never thought about that. Thanks a ton, I'll definitely use this!
@@integral_chemistrysure thing! Found that little tidbit of wisdom in a 1920s book on battery chemistry when batteries used to come in jars. Love your videos!
Petroleum jelly may halt the spread in a certain direction, but it can also contaminate your product. And if your salt is a strong oxidizer, you may have a potentially flammable or explosive oxidizer/fuel mixture.
@@DanielGBenesScienceShows good point
@@atari7001 🤘❤️🤘
Fertilizer-grade chemicals are really way more impure than I thought would be, I definitely need to purify them too before putting them to any reaction. The residue in the filter paper is absolutely gross!
Yeah honestly the urea was probably the cleanest (seems like it was just loaded in what seem to be pebbles and small rocks) but the others are nasty, and the smell was actually pretty gross too.
One chemical I thought I could easily use right out of the container once, but turned out to be one of the most impure foul-smelling sludges ever was actually the nuSalt brand of sodium-free table salt.. all I wanted was potassium chloride but it turned into a whole multi-step cleaning process
@@integral_chemistry The second most important thing after purifying it is the drying process, as I found that many chemicals hold onto so much water that could eventually affect the yield!
@@DangerousLab Yeah you'd really be shocked actually. The biggest thing (depending on whether you're doing organic or inorganic chemistry) are hydrates. Something could be completely dry, but if the molecule itself is chemically bound to water rather than just "still kinda damp" you'll need to adjust calculations accordingly. It can be a real pain sometimes
Very usefull video
I'm answering here because the platform (I can't even mention the name anymore) hides my answers to creator answers.
Unfortunately, I can usually only create initial comments. Things are getting worse on this platform.
So:
Chemi*lis (I can no longer mention channel names either) is based in the Netherlands. I don't know why he chose the United States as his headquarters - perhaps for tactical reasons before his channel went commercial. A lot of what he shows there is only allowed in the EU with a business license. You can also use it to order restricted chemicals in the EU. This also applies to private individuals if you are based in a country where EU laws do not apply. Separate restrictions apply to exports there (e.g. REACH) - but these are interpreted quite differently from country to country (quite liberally by the Eastern Europeans...).
Furthermore, only ammonium and alkali (per)chlorates are restricted for private individuals, also ammonium nitrate. Alkaline and alkaline earth nitrates and light metal powders are monitored, which means they can be used for legal purposes (not pyrotechnics!), but you must expect a house search to be carried out at any time. I can therefore not advise any EU citizen to order them, not even from Poland: customs carries out random checks and often asks the state criminal investigation offices for administrative assistance.
Of course, the same EU laws apply in Poland as in Germany. In addition, there are national laws that are stricter in Germany than in Poland. This leads to the paradoxical situation that some chemicals cannot be ordered online from German retailers as a private individual, but they can be purchased locally in the store. However, most chemical retailers no longer have counter sales because they don't want to deal with the bureaucratic hurdles that come with it. That's why most only sell to commercial customers.
Paradoxically, the possession of the chemicals in question themselves is often permitted, which means: once they have made their way from Poland to you, everything is fine! Did I already mentioned we live in a regulatory madhouse here?🙃
Yes, there are quite a few German chemistry channels. If operated as a hobby, they must comply with the restrictions that apply to private individuals. Otherwise you need a business license. In order to be able to keep it permanently, you need a certain minimum taxable profit. If the channel is too small to generate enough profit, it can no longer be operated commercially. This means that the commercial rights when dealing with chemicals no longer apply and you are once again in uncertain legal territory. That was the reason why I stopped operating the channel.
Then there are also channels that hide their identity (this is no longer allowed here in the EU once they reach a certain size with media influence) and don't care about chemical laws. But you don't have to be surprised if a special task force kicks in the door one morning...
I still have another business running successfully that allows me to handle certain chemicals. That's enough for me. For me, this platform here is just history.
whens the taste test video coming?
Great vid mate. Thank you.
Nice work as always.
i think the last reaction is actually very interesting with the flowering, you're silly
I admit it is quite interesting 😅 I guess at this point I'm just so used to the phenomenon I get more annoyed than anything when it happens unexpectedly.. although it does technically make a good purification technique
Hey man, thankyou so much. This was another great video
I'm glad you enjoyed it! I was honestly worried people wouldn't really be interested in this one, pretty nice to see that isn't the case
Dude, you know that you're on a list now right?
wow. ich staune über ihre Einstellung und die sehr offenen, kritischen Worte (mit denen Sie meiner Meinung nach absolut richtig liegen).
weiter so! Sie haben inzwischen eine gute Reichweite und bewirken evtl. etwas 👍
Back in thw day I used to like performing the double displacement reaction between Ca(NO3)2 & K2SO4 - I even found a use for the plaster paris once washed several times to remove the more useful salt present
- but found a good use for the CaSO4 as a dosing agent in The Thermoaluminium reduction of SiO2 to pure silicon -as a trace amount of oxidiser is still present and Plaster of Paris is a compound of sulphur, makes it easier to initiate.
With that calcium nitrate you can do one of my favorite methods for making nitric acid; addition of just under stoichiometric amounts of sulfuric acid. It precipitates out insoluble gypsum and allows the nitric acid to be filtered, decanted, washed, or distilled out. Just don't let the gypsum block up your filter funnel!
I hate filtering gypsum but I admit I have used that method before
@@integral_chemistry when I last did it I washed the gypsum via vacuum filtration with two paper filters over the frit to allow for easy removal and no blocked frit, it heavily diluted the product but it's easy to distill, and then you don't get gypsum rock forming in your boiling flask. It's still a pain but unless you want to make it from air there's not really a better way to make nitric with easily available reagents afaik.
Awesome mate. 😊
I have recrystalized KNO3 on a regular basis. It comes as prills, and getting rid of the mud makes a huge difference, then you can boil it and crash it out
I "discovered" efflorescence a few months ago while recrystallizing some table salt. It was entirely unexpected, and I didn't know what to call that phenomenon until watching this video. I'm very happy to finally know what it is called! Incidentally, I do have both CAN and Ca(OH)2, so I might try to prepare Ca(NO3)2 later this week.
Nice outro music
You could try next to use the Ca(NO3)2aq -solution to sediment out calcium sulfite CaSO3 and produce HNO3 by letting SO2 (from burning sulfur) into that solution.
You could have mixed the filtered Ca(NO3)2-solution with the filtered (NH4)2SO4-solution to get gypsum and NH4NO3 . Would have saved recrystallization time I suppose. At the yield wouldn´t be that much of a problem.
Filtering gypsum is an absolute nightmare: it clogs filters like nothing else, holds onto water strongly, and isnt even that insoluble to add insult to injury
I did that same thing in my ammonium nitrate video, the objective here specifically was the calcium nitrate (generally less useful than ammonium nitrate, but a lot of people DM'ed me asking to see it). In any case you're right, but I'd actually use ammonium carbonate rather than the sulfate, as calcium carbonate is so so much easier to filter than gypsum
@@billsmathers7787 Overnight sedimentation.
A very fun one to exteact ia ammonium dihydrogen phosphate, usuall listed as ADP on the list. It can be grown into large crystals and they have the curious ability to turn an infrared laser into a green beam.❤
WTF this was pushed to me by the algorithm and now I clicked on it by accident and now I'm on the watch list. Dear Agent friend, I didn't mean to click on this and I'm not watching the rest of it, thanks.
From my experiens calcium nitrate fertilisers often have some kind of gel in it as a filler, that could be why it was so thick in the end. I convert mine to sodium nitrate and wash it with acetone to get the gel out. You could try and dissolve some of your nitrate with acetone to see if it has the same gel in it, tho calcium nitrate is pretty soluble in acetone
Huh.. I hadn't thought of that. I feel an organic gel would have charred in the oven though right? I know calcium acetate also forms a type of jelly, figured that was also the case here. Definitely worth looking into more
From my reasent extraction i havent seem to be able to do it, ive just precipitated out a white solid maybe calciuim nitrate acts like that when there a a lot dissolved, the solubility in water is honestly crazy. Maybe its just left over calcium nitrate disolving in the acetone. Will need to test that
Even in solution at moderate temperature (
Hmm ill have to look into that. I always assumed isocyanic acid only formed from Urea under much more extreme conditions and/or in the molten phase. I feel any produced would still be removed by the filtration, but that will definitely require some looking into on my part
Would DEF (adblue) be more cost-effective method of obtaining urea, since it's just 32,5% mix of urea and water? Might not be depending on area taxes and prices.
Definitely viable, but probably not more cost effective. That stuff is much purer already since it's for auto use, and a lot of cost is added on in shipping weight which is essentially useless water weight.
Definitely faster and easier though if you already have it lying around
Wait, is the urea crystalization what happens in gout?
Pretty similar actually but I'm pretty sure gout is uric acid crystals. Both do have that similar needle-like structure though
8:21 this happens with calcium ammonium nitrate when you remove the calcium from it …. I had a one gallon batch that covered a two foot area in crystals
What about ammonium nitrate?
Efflorescence? You mean superfluidity.
What are we trying to get off the lists now?
Oh no I don't think you can ever get off the lists 😅 just making a bit of innocent chemicals for once
"about 300g" - (checks scales... exactly 300g) ;)
Like this comment
At 7:45 it's peanut butter and black pepper. Gross. 🥲