Isn't it that guy, Gormless or whatevers his face who we need to thank in the kneecaps for that gigantic rusting festering great heap of shite taking up taxpayer's money instead of it being used for, for example, treating paediatric patients in hospital, cancer wards, or fund organ transplants for those in need. Or food banks for those in desperate poverty.
As for me, last few things I took pics of:
Precipitation of pure, extremely fine-grained silica by means of addition of concentrated sulfuric acid to potassium silicate solution (again, very concentrated, to the point of being thick and viscous)
Separation out of the finest grade particulate size, so fine that it feels slimy rather than grainy if squeezed wet between the fingers, colloidal silica, I think, for use to be mixed with a binder such as plaster of paris, and spread over microscope slides, for DIYing up some TLC plates for thin-layer chromatography qualitative separation of analytes, the coarser stuff is being oven dried, then ground finer, and will be used for preparation instead, of silicon metal (well, semimetal/metalloid) to make some bigger pieces than the first few that I got back from the searing heat of a metallothermic reduction of very finely powdered SiO2 (sand essentially, but of a very much higher grade both in terms of purity and of smaller particle size (the smaller the better for preparing the silicon too, since such thermite-type reductions are easier to initiate the finer the particle size of both metal to reduce with (been testing with magnesium and with 30-micron aluminium)
The stuff at the top of the cleaned out, acid-washed coffee jar is the stuff that will be dried out first over chemical dessicants in a dessicator then final drying in a vacuum chamber for chromatography rather than buying the silica, treated as needs be, will experiment until I get good plates, since TLC plates are expensive if bought. Don't want to damage it thermally so will dry over a container full of NaOH/CaCl2 mixture in my dessicator then when I can get no more H2O content out, its going in the vacuum chamber and being left for a few hours
The coarser grained stuff at the bottom, although still damn fine, is being used for refining the silica to silicon, in its elemental state. Here it is drying in the oven, ready to be mixed with a reactive metal like magnesium or aluminium powder, choosing aluminium as I can then test to determine whether shiny, metallic-looking solid lumps are indeed silicon or if they are fused Al powder melted to lumps by the heat of the metallothermic reduction process, which is intense, a carbon crucible is used for the final reduction because metal ones would be unlikely to survive the blazing heat, which is greater than I can actually measure with any of my thermometers, analog or digital.
Roasty roasty:
End product, dried and ready for use, it simply crumbles away to dust when squeezed between the fingertips:
Image taken at night of the reaction once started, between <~30 micron (500 mesh) aluminium dust and the finely powdered silica, photographed through an arc welding mask, with the lid on. The view shield is so dark that its very difficult to see even during the day, to see a damn thing through that mask. The temperatures reached during this reaction must have been hellish indeed.
And, finally, after the first small-scale test run, the removal of the slag manually under water after the carbon crucible cooled down and stopped (during which time it was placed outside) giving off the noxious rotting egg stench of the highly toxic hydrogen sulfide gas from the small depression made in the test-firing charge to which powdered sulfur was added to make a thermate, in order to have that ignite the thermIte, since sulfur addition to thermites lowers ignition temperature and produces what is known as thermate. Acid added outside to remove sulfides as H2S (caution, toxic, similar toxicity to hydrogen cyanide gas) and finally, product is washed, then the slag and crucible contents gouged and dumped out on a surface to pick through, likely textured and size, followed by exclusion of the possibility of being aluminium by soaking in concentrated NaOH which dissolves aluminium, replacing caustic solution one time when hydrogen evolution ceases (quite vigorous from unreacted fine Al)
This digestion process produced the end product: Raw, elemental silicon.
Spent most of the night doing this, going all the way from a silicate and some acid right through to using it as ore and smelting it down to silicon itself.
