Titanium Thermite & Calcium Sulfate

Titanium metal from a thermite reaction has been one of my goals for a long time. I needed it for my element collection, and this thermite is particularly interesting because of the surprising chemicals it uses. The formulation I am using was developed by a fellow blogger and colleague on the Science Madness forum, Gert Meyers. His blog post on the subject can be found here. The following will talk about my efforts to obtain good quality titanium metal from the thermite reaction he lays out. This is a re-post of the info I shared on Science Madness, including many pictures and 3 unlisted Youtube videos never before seen by the general public!

Experiment: Growing Bismuth Crystals

In this experiment, I'll be growing beautiful iridescent crystals out of pure bismuth metal. These "hopper crystals," as they are known, form completely naturally as molten bismuth cools and solidifies. They aren't found in nature, however, because of the specific circumstances required to make them. People make these in labs and sell some pretty amazing samples on eBay. The process is very simple, and is easy for anyone to do at home.

Experiment: Mercury Beating Heart

This old post serves as the Video Companion to  this video.

This is an extremely cool demonstration of electrochemistry involving one of my favorite elements - mercury. It's a shame that it's so toxic, otherwise it would be incredibly fun to play with. The setup for this experiment is simple, but very difficult to get it to work in practice. A droplet of elemental mercury is placed in a solution of an electrolyte and a strong oxidizer. Next a piece of iron is brought near the drop, which then starts to oscillate and looks like a beating heart.

Experiment: Silver Tree

This old post serves as a video companion to this video on my YouTube channel.

This is an experiment I've had since the very beginning of my home laboratory, but for some reason I never got around to doing it. This is a single replacement reaction that precipitates pure silver metal out of a solution of silver nitrate in the presence of solid copper metal. The silver grows on the copper in very fine, hairlike crystals. After a while, they become thick enough to look almost like clouds (see the photos below). The reaction goes fairly quickly at first then slows down - mine appeared to be done after about 30 minutes, but I left it to stew for a few hours to make sure I got all the silver out of solution.