Making Pure Silicon from Scratch
2024 ж. 18 Мам.
51 241 Рет қаралды
In this video I make some elemental silicon while making my whole neighborhood smell bad.
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Also, excuse me for my poor speaking, in case that you don't understand something there are always subtitles made by me.
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0:00 Intro
1:50 Making Iron Oxide - Aluminum Thermite
1:45 Making Silicon Thermite
6:00 Extractiong Silicon From The Slag
8:48 Cleaning The Silicon
10:00 Outro
#chemistry
#experiment
#beautiful
#interesting
Next: Purifying Silicon and making a wafer.
After that: sub 4 nm lithocraphy using low wavelength UV light.
Wonder how the wafer would taste with cream cheese?
@@nunyabisnass1141 Cant recommend
@@1HeartCell What about dipped in Nutella?
@@crazydan9301 Its less about the accompaniments than about the splinters. But you could fry a graphics card by playing kingdom come deliverance on the highest settings and try to eat that if you feel like you need some silicon in your system.
Prussian blue can be removed by first scrubbing with bleach, then after a rinse with water, some HCl. It takes a bit of scrubbing with the bleach but leaves equipment clean afterwards. I had this problem before and this worked for me.
Weird, Bob Ross got it off with paint thinner so easily. Must have been his charm
@@Matoro342 I think more than likely Bob Ross was using a paint based on copper phthalocyanine. Its more stable than prussian blue and kinda the same blue. Its also organic and dissolves easily in organic solvents. So far as I can tell, most "prussian blue" paint doesn't actually have any prussian blue chemical in it.
Be very careful with prussian blue and strong acids, as that will produce HCN. Not sure if HCl is strong enough though, but H2SO4 is for sure. That should destroy the blue color, but it releases the deadly gas same time, and even if you get a non-lethal dose, that is no Fun at all.
@@htomerif must have been his charm
You could try separating the aluminium powder from silicon beads using ye'good'e old'e panning technique. Aluminium density is 2698,72 kg/m3 Silicon density is 2330 kg/m3 So pan them out!
making a silicon wafer from scratch next?
amateur chemistry x sam zeloof?
this
I love this channel I’ve watched every video
Same
If your end goal is silane (SiH4) you could go through an alternate route that doesn't require you to isolate the silicon first. Perform the thermite reaction of SiO2 with a large excess of magnesium instead of aluminum. The excess magnesium will react with the silicon produced to form magnesium silicide (Mg2Si). Reacting the even impure Mg2Si with HCl will form MgCl2 and SiH4.
That's exactly what I would have recommended, too.
I know about this route, and I want to show it in the silane video, but I also wanted to show the silicon one, because it is also pretty interesting, and allows me to make some silicon from dirt :)
@@Amateur.Chemistry Bro you have exactly the same mind as me, using the simplest reagents possible to do something.
@@Amateur.Chemistry OK cool. One more thing: aluminum silicide exists too, and I assume that if you performed the thermite reaction with a large excess of aluminum you would obtain some. I couldn't find much information about it, but maybe it would react with acids too?
Love your videos man! You're so so so so underrated. Been watching literally from the start
Thank you! Also thanks for sticking with this channel for so long!
Props to you for uploading this often and such good content 📈🗿
Thanks for the video! Also, I'm glad that the amount of supporters on patreon is growing!
You can get get realtivwl pire silicon directly from a thermite reaction with fairly lottle cleaning afterwards. With a large enough reaction you can also get a visible crystalline structure in middle of the billet it forms.
This is so awesome, its channels like this and NileRed that make me want to be a chemist
Very nice video! Just a tip: you could generate your H2S in a closed vessel with a tube that goes into a long gas washing tube with bleach. The top of that washing tube could go into a second one just to be sure. That would decrease the smell considerably.
Super! Thank you very much!
Thank you very much!👍👍👍
You're way to underrated! I love your videos
Thank you so much!
I love this channel
That video about making silane from deert is actually impressive. I wanna know what sorts of things you can extract from deert.
You can melt the Si+Al2O3 mix at around 1700C° and pour it on a graphite plate/ingit casting form. The Si melts at 1400°+, but you need to flush it with an enert gas like argon all the time, so the Si doesn't react with O2 in the air. After melting and casting, you will have a Si blob with Al2O3 on the outside.
Great video, 10/10! I really enjoyed watching it. I have an interesting idea for a future video: why not try making a Grignard reagent (or any other organometallic compound) and utilize it to form C-C bonds? It's a rare and fascinating topic for amateur chemistry videos on KZhead. I'd love to see you cover it!
Thanks! I've actually wanted to perform a Grignard reaction for a pretty long time, but for now I want to stick to the more basic stuff and slowly build up to the more complicated ones so I can gain experience and more reagents. And if I did a Grignard reaction I would probably make some tertiary alcohols just for fun.
@@Amateur.Chemistry Make some methanol! And other fun solvents
@suwedo8677 I want to make some diethyl ether from vodka, and methanol from wood.
@@Amateur.Chemistry If you do it I'll do it too on my side :3
The yield is low - but nevertheless you succeeded making an element from dirt, so what? 👍 Btw: I think the sulfide pathway wasn't really necessary - aluminum oxide dissolves in hot dill. HCl very well. Formation of H2S should only be carried out outdoors because it's nearly as toxic a HCN! You can trap the gas in ammonia solution forming ammonium sulfide - a very useful reagent in qualitative analysis.
You could have gotten the silicon beads out by panning them, since most of the aluminum and sand particles were quite small.
thank you
Bro you didn’t have to stink up your whole lab for us😂😂❤️
Hi i have heard that koh reacts with aluminum may be it also reacts with al2o3 which could make separate without sulphur possible maybe. By the way great video.
Thanks! In the future I will probably test that
There is just a little problem with that: KOH will also react with the elemental silicon to form potassium silicate and hydrogen gas.🙁
Agree! Tip, filter out silicon as soon as KOH reaction finishes because KOH also noticibly dissolves silicon if given a few hours, especially with beads this small.
@@Kevin-jz9bg There´s a better way to dissolve the aluminium oxide without affecting the silicon: aluminium oxide may be a bit stubborn to dissolve in cold HCl but if it´s hot hydrochloric acid it will dissolve.
@@Amateur.Chemistry you welcome
My man did Pompei on Ants at 5:00. How dare you
Chemistry and smooth Jazz. That's my kink!
Great video again! But, why didn't you use a trap for the hydrogen sulfide? The stank from such amounts must have been bad, especially outside near the exit of the fume hood vent xD H2S will react with most heavy metals to form usually insoluble salts you can then filter off. Lead acetate works great, we usually use it. Just keep the solution neutral or slightly basic, because under acidic conditions it will release the H2S again. But i guess, as H2S in the air it's gone, trapping it would have caused heavy metal waste. But heavy metal waste you could use to generate the H2S again by just adding an acid.
Could you neutralize the H2S gas with NaOH solution? No heavy metals involved
I recommend trapping H2S with a solution of ammonia - the resulting ammonium sulfide solution is a useful reagent in qualitative analysis.
@@iteragami5078 yes, that is what I would have done too. And the resulting Na2S ist also another useful chemical.
Bubble through bleach and you get sulphur drop
Would panning the silicon and aluminum oxide work to separate them?
@Amateur Chemistry Prussian Blue can be removed by treating it with a solution of sodium hydroxide which will turn it into brown ferric hydroxide a.k.a. iron(III) hydroxide. The ferric hydroxide can then be easily removed with hydrochloric acid.
There's actually a third way to make silicon, the carbothermal reduction process which is usually carried out in a submerged arc furnace, and I'm proud to say that I've successfully done this myself using rocks and wood that I found outside as the reactants and the wood was first converted to charcoal.
Would it be possible to use a rock separating solution like clerici solution to separate? Maybe that's too dense, something less dense but you get the idea
I was thinking the same. Some kind of heavy salt water solution. Assuming silicon and aluminum oxide have a big enough difference in density.
Yes, silicon has a density of 2.336, while aluminium oxide is 3.94, so something like a saturated sodium polytungstate solution (density of 3.1) would do quite well.
After extracting pure silicon, you should go on to make a primitive diode/transistor.
It seems like it would be easy to make a cat's whisker diode with one of the bits that he got.
With whole number percentages of aluminum around, I would guess everything is heavily P-doped to the point of degeneracy i.e. basically a metallic conductor. Still, there might be some lucky spots, or perhaps when in combination with an appropriate metal (rectifying schottky contact). IIRC, degenerate doping makes an ohmic schottky contact regardless of N or P, so probably not, but who knows.
Not a chemist but couldn't you react the mixture in a 2-neck flask with an addition funnel of HCL on one side and a gas tube to lead into some washing/neutralizing apparatus on the other side?
recommendation: make a burn-off apparatus for the acid adding step so that you can burn up the hydrogen sulfide before it escapes into the air. recommendation: use a sieve/strainer to separate the silicon beads since they are larger than the aluminum oxide chunks.
What are you going to make with all this silicon? A valley?
You should melt and consolidate all the beads into a big blob and get it to crystalize properly :D
At 1700 degrees C in the homelab - that sounds not like fun...
@@experimental_chemistry you can get like 2500°C with a homemade spark furnace. Heck you dont even need that, just use a modified MOT to melt it with pure current. Silicon conducts electricity, so just tune the voltage on the secundary on that MOT to match it so that you get around 500W+ of disipated power onto those beads. Or just use a graphite mould and a tig welder's plasma arc. that tungsten point on the torch has like double the melting point of silicon.
@@experimental_chemistry Might need some inert atmosphere too.
@@kfoltman So you're saying, that I just need to smack it with a mig welder?
@@rockytom5889 TIG (perhaps in reverse polarity) would be more appropriate, IMHO. That said, never tried it, and don't know if it's safe.
"Not this one" Genius line and presentation 😂😂😂 1:30
@Amateur Chemistry - over at the Science Madness discussion board, there is a sticky discussion thread created by Fantasma4500 titled "Cleaning glassware and other equipment". I cannot post the link here since KZhead may delete this comment as spam. That thread at Science Madness discusses many ways to remove persistent stains from lab equipment, including mortars and pestles. Various cleaning methods & substances are discussed, such as alcoholic sodium hydroxide, chromic acid, and piranha solution. Hopefully one of these will remove the prussian blue for you.
I want to use silicon to alloy aluminum for small engine. I thought I would be able to create a thermite reaction by just adding sand to molten aluminum but it hasn't worked, the sand just doesn't seem to react and adheres to the slag
Was just at the beach thinking about this
Any confirmation test of silicon? Because i made silicone in my dissertation work in College lab.
i had a question immediately after watching this: do you actually need to use something as strong and regulated as hcl for the first acid step purifying the silicon dioxide? don't get me wrong i think for best purity this is pretty much as good as you're gonna get but if you were wanting to say make your own nonprecision semiconductor stuff (i.e. pin laser diodes, leds, pv cells, etc) couldn't you use another water soluble acid like say vinegar/acetic acid? i think the molten naoh reaction could also be omitted and just use a reasonable naoh solution if you are not concerned with absolute purity. i'd really like to see someone try the electrolysis purification technique too, that special titanium oxide probably isn't needed however i'm not sure what it could be replaced with given the temperatures and extremely reactive conditions. imma get to work exploring the above, ESPECIALLY finding a way to get rid of all the yellow in the thermite reaction. right now i'm thinking maybe something along the lines of wire brushes and preheating, not sure how much luck i'll have there but i'm assuming its not that simple. this is gonna take a while bbl with results in months/years/whenever/never.
Wouldn't concentrated HCl react with Al2O3 to produce AlCl3 and H2O leaving silicon without adding sulfur?
Yellow, the pandemonium of chemistries 💀
Also really nice video, really show the usefulness of thermite other than piromaniac love
Next step after reducing silicon would be to burn it in chlorine, collect silicon chloride. Then evaporate SiCl4 over a glowing hot metal wire, decomposition occurs at around 800+C.
you should use sodium hydroxide to clean up your mortar, it destroy prussian blue instantly
Great video by you as always! PS When are you going to put next spicy content on patreon? 😋
Where did you get your Mg shavings from? Great video btw!
Thanks! I got my magnesium locally from an online store
H2S. 600 ppm. Or one breath will kill you. But it’s suppose to be odorless and colorless. We had training on it in oilfield. And had to wear meters at well sites
Hey! maybe there is something I do not understand here, but couldn't you use concentrated HCl to dissolve everything, but leave the silicon behind? Maybe you won't get perfect beads, but wouldn't that be a way to seperate it?
just to clarify, I mean that if this process works, then why cant we use traditional thermite?
ok like furthermore, is there anything to avoid the annoying tweezer step at the end?
search what Prussian blue pigment is soluble in, then simply add that chemical, right?? also, why is the sulfur necessary _exactly?_
I would suggest to burn the H2S, so you get sulfuric acid vapour which should be easier to handle. Maybe 😅
Cool
Would you have gotten bigger blobs of silicon if you would have made a well in the sand, so all of the molten silicon could have come together?
I'm sorry to have to say this, but SiO2 is NOT the molecular analog of carbon dioxide! It is generally an amorphous material, with semi-crystalline order. Silicon is difficult to extract from SiO2, due to its high affinity to oxygen - i.e. you don't have to postulate hypothetical double bonds for it (because they don't exist there).
Is it amorphous silicon produced here? Can Polycrystalline Silicon be produced from this silicon?
Won't using sand in the thermite reaction invalidate your yield calculations, given that SiO2 is a major component of most sands?
Not by much, thermite is pretty sensitive to particle size, and the sand acting as the reactant bed is pretty coarse compared to the powders intended to react.
Nice video
Thanks!
The ants at 5:20 are experiencing gods work
Next video: making core i9 cpu using homemade silcon and UV-light lithography
it says "from scratch" but i dont see the "inventing the universe" part. thats where im stuck when making things from scratch
I want to try this experiment like crazy but I can't💀 Btw where do you get all these acids?
I made the sulfuric myself from car electrolyte, and just brought the HCl
Nice job well done how are you doing
Thanks, I am doing very well!
@@Amateur.Chemistry good to hear
@@Amateur.Chemistry Hi! I couldn´t help but notice you have some trouble cleaning up Prussian Blue from your mortar. I know the answer to that problem: just treat the Prussian Blue with a solution of NaOH, KOH or aqueous NH3 to convert it into Fe(OH)3 while leaving behind a solution of the corresponding ferrocyanide. After washing, the ferric hydroxide can then be dissolved in an acid that can turn it into a soluble iron(III) salt.
@@chemicalmaster3267 I do this the same way and it always works. Maybe it's easier to treat the stains as long as they are still fresh.
a respirator does not protect from h2s you need a fume hood
Next: homemade BJT transistor 😊
You should have applied flame to the reacting stink. The hydrogen sulfide is flammable & will burn, forming water vapor & sulfur dioxide, a much less stinky & toxic result.
can you really call it pure silicon if you havent purified it by chlorination+distillation?
Sounds like Vince Guarldi jazz.
Gas traps for acidic gasses are easy to make and require only cheap sodium carbonate or hydroxide solution. Please don't just vent nasty gas in the future.
Btw all I know about hydrogen sulfide is that it’s used in alien biospheres
Intresting video but the formula aren't represented accurately like SiO2 doesn't have double bonds and it is a polymer. AlCl3 has more covalent character. Also simply represent iron iii oxide as Fe2O3 and aluminum oxide as Al2O3
👍👍
Dilute sodium hydroxide will dissolve the aluminum oxide away from the silicon. That should eliminate the need for sulfur, & raise the yield.
Alkali hydroxide will dissolve silicon, too. But indeed there's no need to go the sulfide pathway. Aluminum oxide will dissolve in HCl, too, if the acid is heated.
@@experimental_chemistry I can't imagine dilute sodium hydroxide solution dissolving silicon to any extent!
@@bpark10001 But it does! To dissolve aluminum oxide in an alkali hydroxide solution you need a hot or a strong solution - and that's exactly what's able to attack silicon, too (it's also mentioned in German Wikipedia).
I find curious that the channel it´s called amateur chemistry, but has high quality content , setups and reactions.
An acetone/dry ice bath should be cold enough to liquefy hydrogen sulfide gas. Perhaps that could provide a way to make the process more tolerable? The evil liquid could then be disposed-of someplace outdoors well away from humanity. Or you could give it to some children as a toy. ;-)
If the problem of Al + SiO₂ thermite is the unreacted aluminium, why not dissolve it with HCl as you did with the aluminium sulfide? Hydrogen is easier to deal with than H₂S.
That's exactly what I thought, too.
bro you HAVE to distill some trichlorosilane and grow a boule and try and make it pure enough to make into a wafer and dope. and you could send it off to a hobbyist chip fabricator like sam zeloof. imagine, a computer made of dirt!
Why not burn the H2S? It would make water and sulfur dioxide
6:24 'All yellow chemistry is TRASH!'
Why did you hand pick the silicon beads? Why not take a wire mesh vegetable strainer and let all the sand grain sized particles fall out? What am I missing here as you are smart enough to know this? Are there also beads of other side products?
I hand picked them because there were a lot of small clumps of sand similar to the silicon beads in size which I didn't want contaminating my product
dyirt??? haha love that accent
Bro can you help me please I am trying to make a silicon wafer at home a small one I have some questions please reply my comments 🥺🥺🥺🥺
French Deeeeeyurt is the best Deeeeeyurt.
Making metanol from wood
That's a good video idea!
ah yes, diurt XD
now make silicon tetrachloride, then make silicon dioxide and return it to nature. (not serious)
> making pure silicone from scratch doesn't make it from hydrogen via progressive fusion sad_frog.jpg
I wonder if you could make/buy some sort of sieve to do a rough separation first. If you really wanted to be fancy, you might be able to use some sort of shaking table.
"dyirt"
1st: Prussian blue dissolves in basic solutions. Sodiumcarbonate is sufficient. 2nd: There are no double bonds in SiO2. You might want to correct that one. 3rd: Be careful with the pronounciation! You're constantly talking about silicONE (the polymer that is used in bathrooms) but you mean siliCON. Otherwise: nice job!
The h2s should be destroyed not vented. Bubble thru h202 or bisulfite or burn it.
Couldn't you have just classified out the silicon with sieves like people who pan for gold? 🤔
how about SiO2 + C -> Si + CO2, then Si+Cl2 -> SiCl4, then molten electrolysis electro-refined actually pure silicon metal
ok yep any termite reaction, like magnesium/aluminium with the sio2 oxide to get the non-pure metal
use sodium + siO2 as the termite reaction
so why would you want to make SO2
leave the sulfur out, dude
why would you recommend an inferior route/method
how pure? lab grade? semiconductor grade?
There must be some Al oxide trapped inside the beads, so it's not the best quality ever, but there's no easy way to separate it
@@suwedo8677 I see... so still a far cry from wafers
@@deathkeys1 why tf do all of you want to make wafers 😭 it's like we were centuries behind
@@suwedo8677 home cooked transistors taste good
I know thermite from Breaking Bad
If you want to see some great demonstrations of thermite reactions i highly recommend the channel The Gayest Person on KZhead (yes). Even tough he doesn't upload anymore he has done a lot of thermite reactions including one with SiO2
Run it through a strainer
Lane. Do it chemically not thermally
Terribly, terribly inefficient.
Please be mindful of the pronunciation difference between silicon and silicone.