Sodium and mercury

Yo, where are you! We miss you

Thor Correia

In order to determine the amalgam ratio, you can react a known mass of the amalgam with water, and volumetrically measure the hydrogen or probably more accurately, add phenolphthalein and titrate the solution to determine the amount of sodium/NaOH.

What timing! I just found a small blob of a soft metallic substance in one end of the broken inner envelope of a high pressure sodium lamp!

Michael Aichlmayr

Nile, there's a procedure for this particular amalgamation, you have to use a bigger reactor, under argon or nitrogen, at lowered temps (e.g. flushing the reactor with cold argon or nitrogen) and a magnetic stirbar in the mercury pool. Do NEVER add any organic halogens (e.g. H₃CI) to the reactor (you'll end up with alkilated mercury, e.g. H₃CHgCH₃, which is quite horrible)!!! Besides, I'd wear heavy duty metal laminated neoprene gloves on top of the laminated nitrile ones should I deal with this stuff...

At around the mark 15:49 which acid did you use?

Some one else did a project on lead-sodium which would behave differently Red Nile but has some similar properties to Mercury sodium.

Daniel Blake Shoemaker

I did some reactions with Gallium to explore Liquid Metal Erosion (LME) which is what I did on foils of iron, stainless steel, aluminium, copper, lead and pewter about 6 months ago. I've got the videos somewhere on a flash drive... LME is an engineering problem for the oil refining industry (mercury) and nuclear reactors that use metals in their liquid state (sodium). I chose Gallium because it is safe(r). Originally I planned to do a series on it until I noticed Gallium was beaten to death as a fad earlier this decade so... Anywho I still have some metal foils left over if you want to play with them (Pb, Cu, Stainless (309) and some Brass I think). Neat to watch liquid metal drip through metal like wet towel paper. Fun video btw! :)

Brian Reddeman

Im glad you liked it :). Hopefully the ammonium one lives up to the hype

Nile Red

The ammonium amalgam almost look transparent (probably because of the white background). I wonder what the ammonium amalgam looks like with black background.

Ammonium amalgam is bizarre. Looking forward to cool stuff you can think of to do with it.

Patrick Sweetman

Fascinating and enlightening! When you mentioned your amalgam series, my fiance and I both said put loud and in perfect sync "hell yeah" 😁 and at the end when you put the ammonium chroride on the amalgam we did the same thing but with "oh sh**" 😂 we get excited about chemistry. ⚗️ Beyond entertainment though, you do a really great job educating, explaining and demonstrating, thank you.

Add some methyl iodide :P

Cody did a similar experiment while making clorine with a mercury diy motor pump. You guys are simply amazing!

Mercury with Magnesium or Lithium would be interesting, too! And in general more experiments with Lithium or Lithium compounds. I´m a Lithium Fan, btw ;)

It would have been nice to use Lithium as a third element to experience with. Third element, third amalgam :D