Clever source for Lithium

On Mon, 08 Sep 2014 16:54:21 -0500, amdx Gave us:

I thought you were going to say Sloman's skull cavity.

Liquid Sky...

Since I've got a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, I'm less likely to make that kind of absurd mistake.

On Mon, 8 Sep 2014 15:36:59 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman Gave us:

You haven't been off your meds long enough for there not to be a couple pounds of it up there, displacing the fat that was there.

We could harvest one bit of good from your pathetic brain. Not unlike Platinum recovery from a spent catalytic converter.

With the distinct difference being that you come nowhere near the class that Platinum has,

On Tuesday, 9 September 2014 08:48:08 UTC+10, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno w rote:

at kind of absurd mistake.

My cousin did do a Ph.D. on using lithium salts to treat manic-depression, and one of my friends from undergraduate days does suffer from manic-depres sion (though he made a couple of million during a manic phase, so "sufferin g" might not be the right word) He rejects lithium therapy - it makes life boring.

I don't suffer from manic depression and while I do take quite a few pills every day - mostly to keep my circulatory system in working order - lithium isn't listed as a component of any of them

I doubt if you know enough to harvest anything useful anywhere.

Platinum is incorruptible (like the other noble metals) and nobody has trie d to bribed me yet, probably because I don't control anything that would ma ke it worth anybody's while to try to influence my judgement.

Cisplatinum is used to treated testicular cancer, so Lance Armstrong might be harvested for trace amounts of it. It's eliminated pretty rapidly, and d oesn't do the kidneys any good on the way through.

Platinum metal makes a good conductivity electrode, and I know how to put o n a layer of robust platinum black to maximise the surface area. It's handy , but scarcely classy.

I once had the opportunity to plate some titanium electrodes with about a gram the stuff, though it tended to flake off under, ah, vigorous electrolytic conditions (perchlorate oxidation -- attended with the faint odor of ozone!).

I forget what the conditions are for black deposits (I might have a ref to hand), though I don't recall that it was valuable for such aggressive conditions.

To this day, I still have a few pounds of sodium and potassium perchlorate sitting around. I should sell it off. Or maybe not so loudly (to be fair, it's an ORM-D chemical last I checked, so not terrible).

Tim

t's

The technique for creating platinum black is to lay it down fast. You get s teep and unstable concentration gradients close to the surface, so the plat inum is laid down in rapidly branching dendrites.

Making it more robust involved finding a way to cross-link some of the dend rites.

My guess is that your problem was with the electrolyte attacking the titani um rather than the platinum. Titanium resist corrosion by the same mechanis m as alumimium and chromium - forming an inert and coherent layer of oxide on the metal surface. It can also be protected by a coherent layer of titan ium nitride.

This sort of anodisation protection doesn't always work well under electrol ytic conditions. My father had problems trying to electrolyse sodium carbon ate to sodium hydroxide when his stainless steel - which is to say, chromiu m oxide protected - electrodes proved vulnerable to the very alkaline condi tions at the anode. They solved the problem with a different - more alkali- resistant - stainless steel.

Just make sure that there isn't anything oxidisable in the immediate vicint y. Don't store it on a wooden floor, for starters.

Oh yes, surface prep is definitely a likely culprit, too. I did attempt to etch them as well as possible, I think first with NaOH -- molten no less -- followed by a thorough rinse and an HCl bath. Then straight into the plating solution.

Ti dissolves in HCl slowly to form a purple solution (Ti3+), by the way. Neat.

This sort of anodisation protection doesn't always work well under electrolytic conditions. My father had problems trying to electrolyse sodium carbonate to sodium hydroxide when his stainless steel - which is to say, chromium oxide protected - electrodes proved vulnerable to the very alkaline conditions at the anode. They solved the problem with a different - more alkali-resistant - stainless steel.

Mmm, that should be acid resistant -- anions at the anode, after all. Under sufficiently high pH (e.g., electrolyzing NaOH), it shouldn't make much difference (even if the chrome layer dissolves -- which it probably should, forming chromate under those conditions -- the iron and nickel have nowhere to go, only Fe/Ni(OH)2 if at all). The oxygen overpotential is the big player here, the difference between complete and utter corrosion, and happy gas production.

There are only two materials capable of electrolyzing perchlorate (or producing ozone from solution, or forming persulfate, or a number of other high potential reactions): metallic platinum, and crystalline lead dioxide (which can, in turn, be plated anodically from a special lead solution). Or maybe a few variations (PGM oxides), I forget. Neither one is very easy to obtain and use...

I also attempted to use one such anode to produce bromate, but as it turns out, titanium has a soft spot for anodic bromine. Came back to steaming white goop the next day...

Oh yes, it's safely stored in a metal container on a concrete surface. Wouldn't want that getting anywhere, for sure.

Tim

Beats me. My father was doing the work when I was kid at primary school, and talked to me about it while I was an undergraduate. It's all a long time ago. It doesn't seem to be in the archive of his papers, which does seem to be confined to his work in paper chemistry.