I really dont understand why this guy is so productive, its crazy how fast he releases new videos, 'cos these stuff requires lots of work to be honest💙💚💛
He has to be getting these project ideas from other sources. Books, papers, something. So he must have a formula for finding and replicating well documented existing experiments. Essentially what a school science teacher does.
These aren't new experiments he's well educated and probably has hundreds of books full of experiments he's just demonstrating them. Not trying to take away from his intelligence but that's how he does it. Although I'm sure there are a few original ones thrown in here and there
I love this channel. So easy to perpetuate the misunderstanding that distillation etc allow for perfect separation; I love that the truth is mentioned without belaboring it.
You'll make yourself sick drinking it. But I thought it might be useful for concentrating Isoprop too. I have some 70% and a hydrometer. DO NOT DRINK isopropyl alcohol. It can kill you. The stuff in beer and wine and even the harder stuff is Ethyl alcohol. Still a bona fide VOC but less leathal. Ethyl is C2H5OH. Propyl is C3H7OH. Looks similar but it means the difference between life and neath.
@Eddie Hitler It really would be, it tastes like shit. Yes, I'm one of those chemistry guys who has the urge to taste chemicals (I'm far from the only one) as long as it's not going to make me sick or build up in my body I'll sometimes taste a bit of whatever on my finger then spit and rinse. Not nearly as dangerous as most people think, just like most things in chemistry.
When I was in prison my hustle was making "white lightning" (moonshine) out of my home made wine. When I got moved to a max security joint (for often getting caught from the distillation fumes) I found my self in a cell with some former chemist doing the rest of his life for making mdma. He taught me so many things about the wine making process but the best thing he taught me was how to use the salt to pull the booze to the top and then we would siphon the top layer off and have a much smaller amount of total liquid to distill to remove the salt flavor. It shortened the total distillation time and allowed me to get it in between counts and never get caught. We made enough money doing that to live like a king in there. We were able to sell our booze for the best food, weapons, drugs, tobacco, you name it. Thanks science!
Alcohol and salt: cheap, easy, and makes your bong look better than show room new. Finish off with a microfibre cloth polish, and you won't even want to get it dirty again. Almost.
That also cleans literally anything else. Sap? Done. Grease? A breeze. Literally anything. There is a key tho, make sure it's totally dry - NO WATER - pour on the salt into a pile over the messy spot and then pour on just enough isopropyl to turn the salt into a mushy paste. The salt doesn't dissolve in the alcohol as pointed out in this video, so it stays abrasive and importantly holds onto the sticky substance, rather than just smearing it around and making a 10x worse mess. Edit: No, autocorrect, I do _not_ want to wipe away Greece. Edit2: Should clarify, you just gently rub the salt-iso paste into the bad substance, and it quickly picks it up. Wipe the disgusting paste away, and repeat. You can use water to help wipe it away, but you'll need more salt and iso to override the useless water dissolving your useful reagents.
@@rodchallis8031 make sure to use ethanol. huffing iso fumes for a while causes all sorts of bad stuff over time, it's a petroleum distillate. I buy a jug of the cheapest 95% ethanol at the liquor store and we use that for anything we used iso for. For rubbing alcohol, just water it down with a jug of cheap distilled water and throw in a spray bottle so it doesn't evaporate on ya (works as a cleaner and disinfectant too for boo boos that is WAY less BURNING HELL than iso on an open wound and evaporates faster with no residue - iso also leaves residue while completely desiccating the area). This way, you get health benefits instead of toxicity - iso is bad stuff, I know several people from my old work days who had bad results from having their hands in it too much or accidentally ingesting it when they didn't clean up their edibles made with homemade extract. also, the law only regulates the alcohol part of iso - there is no food safe requirement so they can have contaminants in the product that you might want nowhere near your mouth or food items in that other 30% of typical 70% rubbing alcohol you buy at the grocery store. disclaimer: I live in a state where it's legal to make your own farm to table cookies. My recipe is on reddit and I use my name, just like I do here, so if you want you can find it. :-) PSA: *use food grade solvents in your food*
And what's more is the videos are often very original, not just mere replicates of demonstrations seen a thousand times. I really like his perspective on things.
During the early days of COVID when there were severe shortages of sanitizer, I got some isopropyl alcohol that was 50/50 with water. It is not effective an an antiseptic below 60 percent alcohol, so I used the salting out method to get the concentration of isopropyl alcohol up, and then just drew off the top with syringe.
"The blue beads are less dense than salt water but more dense than Alcohol and the white beads are more dense than alcohol but less dense than salt water"... You gave the same description for the two types of beads, but you said the same sentences in opposite order for each type of beads. Is it more precise to say that the white beads are a bit less dense than the blue ones, but they are both denser than alcohol yet less dense than salt water?
@@Trititaty a second thought: the blue beads are denser than the MIX and the white ones are less dense. Both, however, have density between that of alcohol and that of salt water.
@@christmassnow3465 I've read your original comment and it seems to be the only logical explanation. Obviously the beads don't react with any of the liquids, so it must be their difference in density.
@@Trititaty Right. What I meant that once the liquids slowly separate the two beads layers draw close to one another. The second comment was "before" (mixed liquids), the first was the "after" (separating)
You continue to blow my mind with basic, yet brilliant experiments. I mean, you read this bonds with that etc. but seeing it visualized is just amazing.
In Dutch , chemistry goes by the name of "Scheikunde" which is a combination of the words "scheiden" (separate) and "kunde" (art). So , we call it "The Art of Separation" and this very nice video shows how we got to this name. I thought that by adding NaCl to the H2O one would increase the density of that water so as to allow for a better separation. The NaCl does not dissolve in the alcohol , so the top layer has the same density as before.
Yeah he was a little sneaky about that. I was the same way, then I saw the beads and was like what kind of voodoo is this? If he didn't explain it I would have been a mess all day. LOL
I knew immediately it was about differences in densities. Of course I use the internet more for gaining knowledge rather than memes so there is that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Love the way you visualize and display things. Masterful teaching. Even old concepts I'm well familiar with I feel relearned or gleaned a easier or renewed understanding from watching your videos. Keep on making people smarter and the world a better place.
@@hellbusterdragon Ahhh, I have seen it used when trying to extract from plant materials where it used an acid/base process and you had to move the deseried compoud back and forth a couple times to try to strip out impurities that were both polar and non polar. Hehe, have fun in your OC classes!
Excellent presentation. I have never seen this before and I watch a lot of these videos. This demonstration was missed by my chemistry teacher. Thanks so much. Quite entertaining.
This is amazing. I’m a boat mechanic and we deal with water in gas conditions all the time. I’m not about to dump salt into a gas tank but this could be helpful in a fuel sample experiment with alcohol in the mix.
You and DFPercush have good points. Next time I need to dump gas out of my lawnmower because I left it over the winter, I will try the separation technique and see.
as water and petrol dont mix if water got to the fuel filter it would get soaked up by the element and physically stop the petrol from getting through so years ago if i had a water problem in my fuel tank i'd just dump a litre of menthylated spirits into an empty as possible tank and grab the car and give it a good slosh around then fill the tank up with fuel. the metho was 95% ethanol denatured to make it undrinkable, the water dissolved into the metho and the metho dissolved into the petrol and the whole dissolved mixture simply passed through the carby with no noticable effect on engine peformance. one liter of metho in 60l of petrol is no biggie. also when i distill my white lightning the first 1/2 to 1l of foreshots which comes out at 80% is dumped into my car instead of down the drain.
As someone who studies chemistry I already knew this but the way this is presented makes it sound easy and more accessible to someone who is learning about it for the first time
Ethanol is harder to separate from water than isopropanol - table salt won't cut it. You would need to saturate the aqueous phase with potassium carbonate.
4:58 - "The blue beads are less dense than salt water, but more dense than alcohol. And the white beads are more dense than alcohol, but less dense than salt water." Those are the same things just said in reverse order, but I get what you're trying to say. Maybe the better way to phrase that is, when the alcohol and salt water phases are thoroughly mixed, the white beads are less dense than the solution and the blue beads are more dense. So they immediately begin to separate; the blue sink to the bottom and the white float to the top. Then the alcohol and salt water themselves begin to separate; the salt water sinking to the bottom and the alcohol floating to the top. As this happens the white beads begin to sink since they are more dense than the alcohol phase, and the blue beads begin to float since they are less dense than the salt water phase. And so the beads eventually meet up in the middle where the two phases have an interface. As for why the white beads have a different density than the blue beads...idk. I guess that's just a result of how they're made or something. I swear I've seen him use these beads once before in a previous experiment though, but I can't remember when or if he explained their difference in densities in that video.
I would not have wasted time watching this video if had mentioned in the beginning that the beads are of different densities. Honestly i though it had something to do with the chemical structure of the pigments.
Title gives it away right? Well, kinda! But the video was so interesting from the get-go that it had me scratching my head anyway! Keep pumping them out my dude! Love watching your content.
I watched this video a year ago out of the usual curiosity. But for the last month and a half I started resin 3D printing and alcohol is used a lot in washing the prints from the residual resin (when your print is finally pulled out of the resin vat). The alcohol quickly becomes dirty with resin though and soon needs some sort of filtration. Luckily resin and alcohol don't bond together so it's a matter of gravity separation and or passing them thru a filter. But gravity separation usually takes very long (unless you have a lot of alcohol and rotate the batches clean-dirty-clean... etc...) ... unless you turn up the Gravity to the max :) I mean you can use a centrifuge to increase gravity few thousand times. From what I found a waste oil centrifuge type seems best, because it's the simplest can process larger amounts of fluid without spinning it all at once ... the only problem is that the commercially available ones are super expensive (at the bottom range of the tiny lab centrifuges). Anyway this type of centrifuge uses a cylinder (imagine cooking pot) that has a lip on the top (several cm). The heavier pollutants stick to the walls of the cylinder while the clean alcohol is pushed "up" and flows over that lip. When the process is over if you turn off the machine you'll have the pollutants and the amount of fluid that fits in the volume below that top lip. Pollutants however are very small volume, and there still a lot to be extracted from that volume. So my first thought was to use water which is ~21% heavier to displace the alcohol, and then I'll only have water dirty with resin (and tiny amount of alcohol in it). But the H-bond water and alcohol make put a kink in my otherwise flawless plan :D So seeing that we can separate water and alcohol with salt came as a god sent! :) How clean is the alcohol after such separation?
My friend learned this this hard way a while back when he dumped a big part of a vial (100 hits) of very strong LSD suspended in alcohol into a gallon of water. He expected it to mix but he got the entire thing in one gulp. It was good quality so he was fine after a very long night and he even ended up proposing to his wife the next day.
Why is the density different with different colored beads? Do other colored beads dropped into the same solution separate the same way? What is the difference in density between the beads? I understand the water/alcohol solution, but am left with more questions about the beads.
Well if you notice in beads like that, they are not the same bead just painted different colours. The blue ones are made from a blue plastic and the whites from white plastic. I would assume its the same base material and the difference is introduced when the plastic is dyed. I dont know exactly, but I assume it would either be a) blue needs more dye than white (white maybe none?) to produce the colour b) different base materials are needed for the blue and white dyes and thats the difference c) a little of both?
@@joeshedler6496 it could also be that both colors are from different brands or materials or qualities. Like ABS PVC or nylon. Or good quality pure nylon vs nylon with something cheap to add volume.
Nice video, no idea why it showed up in my suggestions, but I liked it :) @5:17 Indeed, I do use salt frequently in the lab to precipitate DNA out of its solution, then centrifuge to pellet it followed by washing in ~70% ethanol to remove some of the salt and other contaminants. Then centrifuge again, dry the pellet and dissolve in water. It's actually pretty easy. In the animation, by the way, I see you haven't depicted a 3 carbon-backbone for isopropyl-alcohol, but a single carbon-backbone which would make it a methyl-alcohol.
@2:03 now the animation is corrected may be. And I am curious will this work with ethanol instead of isopropyl alcohol. Due to legal reasons, no youtuber is talking about it, but I am just curious. There are some videos were they used k2co3 but why not just NaCl to separate out ethanol?
Written before watching the complete video: This works best with alcohols that have long carbon chains. I.e. Isopropyl alcohol has a higher lipophilicity than ethanol or methanol, which makes separating it out a lot easier in comparison. By adding salt, you're using the water to form hydration shells around the salt ions (which have a much higher hydrophilicity due to their charge and hence are preferred), which means that these water molecules stop solvating the alcohol, allowing it to "fall out" of solution and raise to the top due to its lower density. There will still be some alcohol in the water phase and vice versa as this is an equilibrium reaction. After watching: Nice to see that you provided a complete explanation!! Keep at it.
Hey action lab congratulation a question in JEE advanced 2021 which is considered the world's second toughest exam was very similar infact just as you explained in your video of reverse cartesian diver. i know that you too might have referred some research paper but your explanation helped a lot to solve the question
Wow has that been helpful - as a "Pre-Still" process adding salt would wash the alcohol as well. This is so helpful - in the still it's all the yucky flavours in the water you need to get rid of and after you can use it as weed kill. I Liked this The Action Lab demo
Liked the clip. These subtle techniques can be real moneymakers, I would guess. Or you can use the general approach and do the reverse; to enhance the miscibility of a small volume of water (in a car's gas tank --- the water will settle on the tank's bottom, thereby increasing the odds of gas-line freezing during colder weather), if you use the proper alcohol, isopropyl alcohol. ... 91% gotten from the local pharmacy will work just fine, in my experience. About a cup per tank full of gas.
great one! just some clarification - this will not work with ethanol or methanol. afaik there is no soluble compound which can separate EtOH or MeOH from water like this.
Why then, don't the hillbillies running stills freeze their "brew" instead of distilling it? I'm curious. Freezing would be a lot easier to hide from the revenuers.
@@brett4264 it's been done. Problem is that it's hard to remove the methanol. Usually you just toss the first bit that comes out of the still, the "heads", but with freezing that becomes more difficult. What you can do, is use it to concentrate the alcohol further after distilling. You could end up with very potent spirits.
The blue beads are less dense than salt water but more dense than alcohol, and the white beads are more dense than alcohol but less dense than salt water. Isn't that the same? Why do the white beads float on top at first and the blue beads sink, are the blue ones slightly more dense?
Because when the solution is mixed it has an average density that is greater than the alcohol alone hence the white beads float; and is lower than saltwater alone hence the blue beads sink. But after awhile the saltwater sinks to the bottom - becoming more concentrated and so more dense causing the blue beads to float. At the same time the alcohol is also separating out and becoming less dense causing the white beads to sink. They meet at the boundary of the two solutions.
This works quite well with ethanol as well. You can take Everclear, which is 95% ethanol and make it above 99% pure. I'm not sure if you will notice the difference in your cocktail!
@@tomgardner1459 Stays with the water as a hydrate. Forms a separate layer if allowed to settle. Thus you can decant off the alcohol and effectively leave the salt and water behind.
I really dont understand why this guy is so productive, its crazy how fast he releases new videos, 'cos these stuff requires lots of work to be honest💙💚💛
I was thinking the same thing the other day.. its amazing how he finds the materials and gear for all these experiments
He has to be getting these project ideas from other sources. Books, papers, something. So he must have a formula for finding and replicating well documented existing experiments. Essentially what a school science teacher does.
These aren't new experiments he's well educated and probably has hundreds of books full of experiments he's just demonstrating them. Not trying to take away from his intelligence but that's how he does it. Although I'm sure there are a few original ones thrown in here and there
It's his job, why wouldn't he do that.
His motivation is his love for science. Which doesn't wax and wane.
It's such a simple experiment but I've never seen it before. Awesome stuff!
Eh watch every experiment he's done
Before the video, he coated the blue beads with lacquer, to make them slightly heavier.
Never did this chemistry class, wonder why! ☺
I love this channel. So easy to perpetuate the misunderstanding that distillation etc allow for perfect separation; I love that the truth is mentioned without belaboring it.
So much for copper tubes etc!!!
@@mrchordstriker I am not sure that alcohol produced by the salting out method would be good to drink.
@@peterjf7723 I was thinking fuel. But saki is pretty salty.
Yep, azeotropes are a real thing, but a lot of people have trouble understanding the concept.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 thanks and...this is a great channel also because it attracts us thinkers :)
"& then I have some isopropyl alcohol"
swigs the alcohol
I thought about the same thing.
Sip from the water, sip from the alcohol
Thought the same, only I thought maybe he'd grab some vodka and take a swig.
You'll make yourself sick drinking it. But I thought it might be useful for concentrating Isoprop too. I have some 70% and a hydrometer. DO NOT DRINK isopropyl alcohol. It can kill you. The stuff in beer and wine and even the harder stuff is Ethyl alcohol. Still a bona fide VOC but less leathal. Ethyl is C2H5OH. Propyl is C3H7OH. Looks similar but it means the difference between life and neath.
@Eddie Hitler It really would be, it tastes like shit. Yes, I'm one of those chemistry guys who has the urge to taste chemicals (I'm far from the only one) as long as it's not going to make me sick or build up in my body I'll sometimes taste a bit of whatever on my finger then spit and rinse. Not nearly as dangerous as most people think, just like most things in chemistry.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 That's how the discoverer of oxygen, Carl Scheele, died.
When I was in prison my hustle was making "white lightning" (moonshine) out of my home made wine. When I got moved to a max security joint (for often getting caught from the distillation fumes) I found my self in a cell with some former chemist doing the rest of his life for making mdma. He taught me so many things about the wine making process but the best thing he taught me was how to use the salt to pull the booze to the top and then we would siphon the top layer off and have a much smaller amount of total liquid to distill to remove the salt flavor. It shortened the total distillation time and allowed me to get it in between counts and never get caught. We made enough money doing that to live like a king in there. We were able to sell our booze for the best food, weapons, drugs, tobacco, you name it. Thanks science!
I was going to ask if this worked with ethanol, but now I'll try that in my cookie recipe.
@@russellzauner cookie? Is that slang for a type of booze?
@@bryanblack505 Cookie is a type of street drug that is highly addictive. Chocolate chip being the most popular cookie.
Please tell us you're free and living in the desert living it large.
What were you in for?
I've seen this separation when I used isopropyl alcohol and salt to clean my.... glassware. Good to know this is what is happening!
Just say bong, its 2021 people smoke weed
Alcohol and salt: cheap, easy, and makes your bong look better than show room new. Finish off with a microfibre cloth polish, and you won't even want to get it dirty again. Almost.
That also cleans literally anything else. Sap? Done. Grease? A breeze. Literally anything. There is a key tho, make sure it's totally dry - NO WATER - pour on the salt into a pile over the messy spot and then pour on just enough isopropyl to turn the salt into a mushy paste. The salt doesn't dissolve in the alcohol as pointed out in this video, so it stays abrasive and importantly holds onto the sticky substance, rather than just smearing it around and making a 10x worse mess.
Edit: No, autocorrect, I do _not_ want to wipe away Greece.
Edit2: Should clarify, you just gently rub the salt-iso paste into the bad substance, and it quickly picks it up. Wipe the disgusting paste away, and repeat. You can use water to help wipe it away, but you'll need more salt and iso to override the useless water dissolving your useful reagents.
@@rodchallis8031 make sure to use ethanol. huffing iso fumes for a while causes all sorts of bad stuff over time, it's a petroleum distillate. I buy a jug of the cheapest 95% ethanol at the liquor store and we use that for anything we used iso for. For rubbing alcohol, just water it down with a jug of cheap distilled water and throw in a spray bottle so it doesn't evaporate on ya (works as a cleaner and disinfectant too for boo boos that is WAY less BURNING HELL than iso on an open wound and evaporates faster with no residue - iso also leaves residue while completely desiccating the area).
This way, you get health benefits instead of toxicity - iso is bad stuff, I know several people from my old work days who had bad results from having their hands in it too much or accidentally ingesting it when they didn't clean up their edibles made with homemade extract.
also, the law only regulates the alcohol part of iso - there is no food safe requirement so they can have contaminants in the product that you might want nowhere near your mouth or food items in that other 30% of typical 70% rubbing alcohol you buy at the grocery store.
disclaimer: I live in a state where it's legal to make your own farm to table cookies. My recipe is on reddit and I use my name, just like I do here, so if you want you can find it. :-)
PSA: *use food grade solvents in your food*
Please explain the process for cleaning glassware and the recipe used
And what's more is the videos are often very original, not just mere replicates of demonstrations seen a thousand times. I really like his perspective on things.
During the early days of COVID when there were severe shortages of sanitizer, I got some isopropyl alcohol that was 50/50 with water. It is not effective an an antiseptic below 60 percent alcohol, so I used the salting out method to get the concentration of isopropyl alcohol up, and then just drew off the top with syringe.
Got noose for ya. It still is the early days of COVID...
I just made a still then made some sanitiser from that and drank the rest. Now I have my own sanitiser production facility.
What's a sever shortage?
@@michaelscofield1826 A sever shortage is when not enough grammar nazis have their fingers chopped off.
I’m learning about all of this in Organic Chemistry class in college! Very interesting!
"The blue beads are less dense than salt water but more dense than Alcohol
and the white beads are more dense than alcohol but less dense than salt water"...
You gave the same description for the two types of beads, but you said the same sentences in opposite order for each type of beads.
Is it more precise to say that the white beads are a bit less dense than the blue ones, but they are both denser than alcohol yet less dense than salt water?
Yeah, I've replayed this part around 3 times to spot the difference in the phrasing but there's none except the order.
@@Trititaty a second thought: the blue beads are denser than the MIX and the white ones are less dense. Both, however, have density between that of alcohol and that of salt water.
@@christmassnow3465 I've read your original comment and it seems to be the only logical explanation. Obviously the beads don't react with any of the liquids, so it must be their difference in density.
tails I win, heads you lose
@@Trititaty Right. What I meant that once the liquids slowly separate the two beads layers draw close to one another. The second comment was "before" (mixed liquids), the first was the "after" (separating)
You continue to blow my mind with basic, yet brilliant experiments. I mean, you read this bonds with that etc. but seeing it visualized is just amazing.
I love how this experiment is done with stuff pretty much everyone has in their kitchen.👨🔬🧂💧🥃✍️
Don't get started on explosives then....🤣😂😁😀😎
@@rodmills4071 I did plant a mum bush🌼 not long ago. Maybe if I dig up the fertilizer...🤔
Now hypothetically what would happen if I drank all of that... Like hypothetically haha... 😅😅
It would be insanely bitter, harsh, burning, and incredibly salty
In Dutch , chemistry goes by the name of "Scheikunde" which is a combination of the words "scheiden" (separate) and "kunde" (art). So , we call it "The Art of Separation" and this very nice video shows how we got to this name.
I thought that by adding NaCl to the H2O one would increase the density of that water so as to allow for a better separation.
The NaCl does not dissolve in the alcohol , so the top layer has the same density as before.
For the first minute I was like ‘WTF HOW’
Yeah he was a little sneaky about that. I was the same way, then I saw the beads and was like what kind of voodoo is this? If he didn't explain it I would have been a mess all day. LOL
I knew immediately it was about differences in densities.
Of course I use the internet more for gaining knowledge rather than memes so there is that.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@TheTubejunky don't tell you are a genius
Another awesome experiment!!! ActionLab your the best👍👍👍👍
You need a Saturday morning TV show on the Science Channel.
Love the way you visualize and display things. Masterful teaching. Even old concepts I'm well familiar with I feel relearned or gleaned a easier or renewed understanding from watching your videos. Keep on making people smarter and the world a better place.
This is so much important to me now! Especially since I have to study Organic Chemistry and about Azeotropic solutions
The process of salting out should be familiar to someone studing OC I would assume. Im def no chemist and I have heard of that before.
@@joeshedler6496 Salt Analysis was an optional for me I guess. We only have it as practicals and not yet taught to us.
@@hellbusterdragon Ahhh, I have seen it used when trying to extract from plant materials where it used an acid/base process and you had to move the deseried compoud back and forth a couple times to try to strip out impurities that were both polar and non polar. Hehe, have fun in your OC classes!
@@joeshedler6496 having fun is the last thing around here now, but thanks anyways
@@hellbusterdragon Yeah, often people dont agree with me what fun is. I'd love to be in a chem class. Im just an IT guy LOL
James:how to separate water and alcohol ?
Me : of sanitizers also
Excellent presentation. I have never seen this before and I watch a lot of these videos. This demonstration was missed by my chemistry teacher. Thanks so much. Quite entertaining.
I just had my Science paper and this could have really helped me
Lol
Sounds too convenient to be true
This is amazing. I’m a boat mechanic and we deal with water in gas conditions all the time. I’m not about to dump salt into a gas tank but this could be helpful in a fuel sample experiment with alcohol in the mix.
Ethanol gas also contains emulsifiers, that might throw a monkey wrench into things. Definitely test with a known sample first.
You and DFPercush have good points. Next time I need to dump gas out of my lawnmower because I left it over the winter, I will try the separation technique and see.
as water and petrol dont mix if water got to the fuel filter it would get soaked up by the element and physically stop the petrol from getting through so years ago if i had a water problem in my fuel tank i'd just dump a litre of menthylated spirits into an empty as possible tank and grab the car and give it a good slosh around then fill the tank up with fuel. the metho was 95% ethanol denatured to make it undrinkable, the water dissolved into the metho and the metho dissolved into the petrol and the whole dissolved mixture simply passed through the carby with no noticable effect on engine peformance. one liter of metho in 60l of petrol is no biggie. also when i distill my white lightning the first 1/2 to 1l of foreshots which comes out at 80% is dumped into my car instead of down the drain.
As someone who studies chemistry I already knew this but the way this is presented makes it sound easy and more accessible to someone who is learning about it for the first time
This is pretty amazing. I'm tempted to mix my Everclear with water to see if I can turn it back into Everclear.
Ethanol is harder to separate from water than isopropanol - table salt won't cut it. You would need to saturate the aqueous phase with potassium carbonate.
Bro you are kidding me how i didn't know about this 💀 action lab I love how your videos always show me things I didn't know about as a chemist
I somehow found beauty in both the visible separations taking place as well as in your explanations.
Well done indeed! TY.
4:58 - "The blue beads are less dense than salt water, but more dense than alcohol. And the white beads are more dense than alcohol, but less dense than salt water."
Those are the same things just said in reverse order, but I get what you're trying to say. Maybe the better way to phrase that is, when the alcohol and salt water phases are thoroughly mixed, the white beads are less dense than the solution and the blue beads are more dense. So they immediately begin to separate; the blue sink to the bottom and the white float to the top.
Then the alcohol and salt water themselves begin to separate; the salt water sinking to the bottom and the alcohol floating to the top. As this happens the white beads begin to sink since they are more dense than the alcohol phase, and the blue beads begin to float since they are less dense than the salt water phase. And so the beads eventually meet up in the middle where the two phases have an interface.
As for why the white beads have a different density than the blue beads...idk. I guess that's just a result of how they're made or something. I swear I've seen him use these beads once before in a previous experiment though, but I can't remember when or if he explained their difference in densities in that video.
Was going to post the same comment. Minus the lower three paragraphs :p
Dude.. who is gonna read this much
I stopped as soon as i pressed "read more"
I would not have wasted time watching this video if had mentioned in the beginning that the beads are of different densities. Honestly i though it had something to do with the chemical structure of the pigments.
The visual explanations on this channel are so simple but so ridiculously effective
Thank you very very much. Just discovered your channel. You re answering me a lot of questions... Have a good day, very very thank you
Your channel is my favourite channel about science and physics
Ahh this is why Neil Red adds salts to some of his solutions.
Nile*
@@heckinggi6034 nyle*
Nile deGrasse Tyson*
@@llizardcz6230 😢
Why does he do it, i dont get it
Super easy way to separate organic compound from water
Thanks for this information
Fantastic, do more chemistry classes like that and children would one day become scientists 👨🔬
44 years learning something new everyday :D
Title gives it away right? Well, kinda! But the video was so interesting from the get-go that it had me scratching my head anyway! Keep pumping them out my dude! Love watching your content.
I watched this video a year ago out of the usual curiosity.
But for the last month and a half I started resin 3D printing and alcohol is used a lot in washing the prints from the residual resin (when your print is finally pulled out of the resin vat).
The alcohol quickly becomes dirty with resin though and soon needs some sort of filtration. Luckily resin and alcohol don't bond together so it's a matter of gravity separation and or passing them thru a filter. But gravity separation usually takes very long (unless you have a lot of alcohol and rotate the batches clean-dirty-clean... etc...) ... unless you turn up the Gravity to the max :)
I mean you can use a centrifuge to increase gravity few thousand times. From what I found a waste oil centrifuge type seems best, because it's the simplest can process larger amounts of fluid without spinning it all at once ... the only problem is that the commercially available ones are super expensive (at the bottom range of the tiny lab centrifuges).
Anyway this type of centrifuge uses a cylinder (imagine cooking pot) that has a lip on the top (several cm). The heavier pollutants stick to the walls of the cylinder while the clean alcohol is pushed "up" and flows over that lip. When the process is over if you turn off the machine you'll have the pollutants and the amount of fluid that fits in the volume below that top lip.
Pollutants however are very small volume, and there still a lot to be extracted from that volume.
So my first thought was to use water which is ~21% heavier to displace the alcohol, and then I'll only have water dirty with resin (and tiny amount of alcohol in it).
But the H-bond water and alcohol make put a kink in my otherwise flawless plan :D
So seeing that we can separate water and alcohol with salt came as a god sent! :)
How clean is the alcohol after such separation?
Alcohol to salt : wanna bond?
Salt : na bro only h2O
I our school we learnt about separating ethanol and water using fractional distillation so that’s another way!
fantastic demonstration! physics is so amazing, driving *everything* via energy potential differences.
You can use a freezer to separate the mixture. The water will freeze, but alcohol will not.
This technique is used to concentrate Apple Jack.
Thanks i will try .i think this method dosnot work with ethanol
I'm 26 yrs old with 3 years of pharmaceutical work experience.... I still regret not having this guy as my science teacher.... 😂
My friend learned this this hard way a while back when he dumped a big part of a vial (100 hits) of very strong LSD suspended in alcohol into a gallon of water. He expected it to mix but he got the entire thing in one gulp. It was good quality so he was fine after a very long night and he even ended up proposing to his wife the next day.
Nice, need a video about helium magical property. Bye
If you have made video of separating alcohol from sanitizer earlier this would have been helped many Indians
Your description of distillation was more than averagely accurate for one so short. Nice.
Why is the density different with different colored beads? Do other colored beads dropped into the same solution separate the same way? What is the difference in density between the beads?
I understand the water/alcohol solution, but am left with more questions about the beads.
I'm just guessing that the white ones simply have the original color while any other color needs pigment added. That adds to the density.
Well if you notice in beads like that, they are not the same bead just painted different colours. The blue ones are made from a blue plastic and the whites from white plastic. I would assume its the same base material and the difference is introduced when the plastic is dyed. I dont know exactly, but I assume it would either be a) blue needs more dye than white (white maybe none?) to produce the colour b) different base materials are needed for the blue and white dyes and thats the difference c) a little of both?
@@Ktulu789 Oh I could have saved a bunch of typing if I had seen your reply before I decided to reply. LOL
@@joeshedler6496 it could also be that both colors are from different brands or materials or qualities. Like ABS PVC or nylon. Or good quality pure nylon vs nylon with something cheap to add volume.
@@joeshedler6496 maybe the white ones, for some manufacturing process have air bubbles that the others don't, because they are better quality.
Nice video, no idea why it showed up in my suggestions, but I liked it :) @5:17 Indeed, I do use salt frequently in the lab to precipitate DNA out of its solution, then centrifuge to pellet it followed by washing in ~70% ethanol to remove some of the salt and other contaminants. Then centrifuge again, dry the pellet and dissolve in water. It's actually pretty easy.
In the animation, by the way, I see you haven't depicted a 3 carbon-backbone for isopropyl-alcohol, but a single carbon-backbone which would make it a methyl-alcohol.
@2:03 now the animation is corrected may be. And I am curious will this work with ethanol instead of isopropyl alcohol. Due to legal reasons, no youtuber is talking about it, but I am just curious. There are some videos were they used k2co3 but why not just NaCl to separate out ethanol?
Written before watching the complete video: This works best with alcohols that have long carbon chains. I.e. Isopropyl alcohol has a higher lipophilicity than ethanol or methanol, which makes separating it out a lot easier in comparison. By adding salt, you're using the water to form hydration shells around the salt ions (which have a much higher hydrophilicity due to their charge and hence are preferred), which means that these water molecules stop solvating the alcohol, allowing it to "fall out" of solution and raise to the top due to its lower density. There will still be some alcohol in the water phase and vice versa as this is an equilibrium reaction.
After watching: Nice to see that you provided a complete explanation!! Keep at it.
I really like your channel, why you only have 3M like you deserve better
Finally a non-gimmicky Action Lab video. Good work.
Hey action lab congratulation
a question in JEE advanced 2021 which is considered the world's second toughest exam was very similar infact just as you explained in your video of reverse cartesian diver.
i know that you too might have referred some research paper but your explanation helped a lot to solve the question
“So I have some regular water here”
*takes swig to show it’s real water
Me: 😮
*cuts video anyway
Best channel on RUclips! Period!
😌
That was really cool mr. Wizard kind of stuff there
Thanks- one of the most fascinating experiments I've ever seen!
Action Lab: "so they don't care if they're bonded with alcohol or water."
Me: "but I do!"
Awesome. So distillation is not necessary anymore how awesome!!!
OMGGGG you dont know how this video helps me answer a question i've been wondering the whole evening!
Wow has that been helpful - as a "Pre-Still" process adding salt would wash the alcohol as well.
This is so helpful - in the still it's all the yucky flavours in the water you need to get rid of and after you can use it as weed kill.
I Liked this The Action Lab demo
Liked the clip. These subtle techniques can be real moneymakers, I would guess. Or you can use the general approach and do the reverse; to enhance the miscibility of a small volume of water (in a car's gas tank --- the water will settle on the tank's bottom, thereby increasing the odds of gas-line freezing during colder weather), if you use the proper alcohol, isopropyl alcohol. ... 91% gotten from the local pharmacy will work just fine, in my experience. About a cup per tank full of gas.
"So i have some regular water here" takes a sip
"And then i have some isopropyl alcohol" starts chugging it
As a chemist student that what we do in laboratory to separate water and organic substance, but we don't use bottle we use separatory funnel
Thanks for the detailed breakdown
That was a really great presentation. Thanks for being you👍🏻
great one! just some clarification - this will not work with ethanol or methanol. afaik there is no soluble compound which can separate EtOH or MeOH from water like this.
so, you have to get the water to it's saline saturation point, and it's separating along the gradient. neat!
Good vid. Better than older ones.
Our science teacher showed this to us once, but the connection to salting out I've never thought of!
You can also just freeze the bottle to separate them. Water and alcohol freeze at different temps. You'll end up with ice floating on alcohol.
Why then, don't the hillbillies running stills freeze their "brew" instead of distilling it? I'm curious. Freezing would be a lot easier to hide from the revenuers.
@@brett4264 it's been done. Problem is that it's hard to remove the methanol. Usually you just toss the first bit that comes out of the still, the "heads", but with freezing that becomes more difficult. What you can do, is use it to concentrate the alcohol further after distilling. You could end up with very potent spirits.
Thanks, I enjoy all of your videos.
Awesome man , keep em coming
lovely visual demonstration! Your explanation is only half right... but that's how it goes with communicating chemistry concepts on a youtube video!
1:33 i think it's Due to the fact that white Absorbers less heat than blue so blue become hotter and hot things moves up in the solution than cooler .
Can't think of any occasion when I would need to do this or even know it, yet its so darn interesting and entertaining to watch.
This Channel Is Way Better Than My School Was
Thanks guys!
Please do the experiments done by many great scientists.
That's a cool practical example.
Love your channel
Hey, now that you have two phases like this, you can start playing around with the wonderful world of solvent extraction (SX for short).
I pay more attention to him than my science teacher
The blue beads are less dense than salt water but more dense than alcohol, and the white beads are more dense than alcohol but less dense than salt water.
Isn't that the same? Why do the white beads float on top at first and the blue beads sink, are the blue ones slightly more dense?
Because when the solution is mixed it has an average density that is greater than the alcohol alone hence the white beads float; and is lower than saltwater alone hence the blue beads sink. But after awhile the saltwater sinks to the bottom - becoming more concentrated and so more dense causing the blue beads to float. At the same time the alcohol is also separating out and becoming less dense causing the white beads to sink. They meet at the boundary of the two solutions.
This would be really interesting for a Weird Science activity at the nursing home where I work!
so simple yet so cool
As always, crazy awesome videos. You're the best!
thanks for making this video, it is so cool
5:15 "It's called salting out" ... that happens a lot in video games also
This works quite well with ethanol as well. You can take Everclear, which is 95% ethanol and make it above 99% pure. I'm not sure if you will notice the difference in your cocktail!
Will the salt mix with the ethanol? Or does all the salt stay with the water phase
@@tomgardner1459 Stays with the water as a hydrate. Forms a separate layer if allowed to settle. Thus you can decant off the alcohol and effectively leave the salt and water behind.
Wish if I my chemistry teacher was this energetic
I always learn so much from you, but I sometimes feel so cheated because it's never what I think it was :(
But I still love you ActionLab chan ^^
thanks!!
Wow, this is amazing! 👍🏼😀
But can you separate church and state
AMSTERDAM
THANKS MAN,
I LOVE TO SHOW MY
KIDS
IT TRIGGERS THEIR
CURIOSITY
Great Demonstration
this is really cool! thank you
very cool. thank you very much. God bless you
Awesome. Thank you.
I learned something, thank you sir!