Make Sodium Metal with Menthol (and a bunch of other stuff...)

Could anyone recommend a good source for high temp stir bars. I’ve attempted this twice now, both times my stir bars crap out right around 200 C. It seems I’m not the only one with the issue. https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/148052/multiple-stir-bars-have-lost-their-magnetism

Could you use this method to make other difficult to extract metals? I'm guessing potassium could be done? What about calcium? This is very interesting research and I'm wondering if it could be applied in other ways. Thanks in advance.

LFTRnow

in theory yes. but i'be never tried it. i don't know how easy it is to recycle the mineral oil from the magnesium oxide slag. I suspect the menthol will stick to the magnesium oxide so you'll lose a portion of it when you filter.

NurdRage

Since menthol won't boil away can I reuse the mineral oil without adding more? Just curious...

Sean Walton

oh that's just to get the sodium bits to coalesce. If you don't do it, the sodium doesn't like to come back together even though it's liquid. You can still do it, but it's just so much easier once you add a bit of menthol. In theory you could use any alcohol. But i figure if you already got this far in the experiment, you have menthol conveniently lying around so might as well use it.

NurdRage

Dr. Lithium fantastic work. I am not a chemist but I enjoyed the journey while looking over your shoulder, so to speak. I have a question. Why is menthol necessary during the "explosive carrot" production step? Seems that once the sodium is liquefied, gravity is performing the Mg separation step.

Nice to see this series wrapped up, especially with the walkthrough of the apparatus setup.

jason black

i'm not sure about that. But an alternative mineral oil might be food grade mineral oil used for cleaning food processing equipment. They aim to be as cheap as possible so they wouldn't have additives. check the labels if you explore in that direction.

NurdRage

The easiest to get hypoallergenic baby oil product for me in the UK (Johnson's) apparently contains isopropyl myristate and 'parfum'. Is this likely to be a problem?