Gallium Induced Structural Failure of an Aluminum Baseball Bat

I still have mine, i'm trying to figure out how to recover the gallium. But if you wanted to get rid of it, it can go in the trash. gallium is non-toxic like aluminum and much less damaging to the environment compared to other things we throw out.

NurdRage

What do you do with the alloy after these experiments? does it just go in the trash?

Everfalling

HEY can u give me a shout out please, me and my friend are trying to get a more.... better youtube account please and thank you

it remains in the aluminum and contaminates the rest of the batch. Once its recast you now have a homogeneous alloy. It'll be somewhat weaker than the original aluminum depending on how much gallium is present. the real danger though is corrosion. Gallium makes aluminum vulnerable to corrosion. What should last for twenty years may only last a few. Fortunately, gallium is pretty expensive so it's unlikely large amounts are going to be accidentally tossed into the recycling. If sufficiently diluted into a large enough batch of aluminum the effects are somewhat mitigated. Safety critical applications like aerospace usually have their own testing laboratories for every shipment of aluminum that comes in to ensure it absolutely meets specifications so it's unlikely compromised aluminum would find its way into an airplane.

NurdRage

i'm curious: does the gallium/aluminum alloy survive a smelting process? Like if you took those aluminum shards from the bat to a recycling center could you potentially be contaminating all the aluminum that those shards are melted with? or does the gallium get separated and come out as part of the slag/dross?

Everfalling

Nevermind. I'm an idiot the didn't check my email account or the past few days. My bad.

Why did this go out to the masses before being posted here? Not hugely miffed, just making sure you didn't want the published video not published for all of YouTube.