Help me make more videos like this one:
In a previous video we made an alloy of potassium and sodium metals and then showed what happens when you shoot it into water a lot of you asked why can we eat table salt or bananas since those have sodium and potassium without exploding it isn’t because it’s a mixture of sodium and potassium metals sodium metal on its own explodes fine in water and potassium
Lights on fire and then explodes so what makes sodium chloride table salt so different well let’s make some chlorine and find out a quick note before we begin these chemicals are all very dangerous absolutely do not try this at home this is an apparatus to make chlorine chlorine is a yellowish green highly corrosive gas we do this by carefully adding hydrochloric
Acid to pool chlorine liberating chlorine gas from the complex organic molecules within to get this reaction started we’ll heat the sodium up until it’s red hot and then dip it into the chlorine gas immediately the two elements react together forming sodium chloride which is table salt so why do these two elements react together so strongly but are perfectly stable
In sodium chloride to answer that we’ll need to go to the periodic table as we go from left to right each element has an additional proton and electron and this wraps as we continue down the periodic table because of complicated quantum mechanics certain amounts of electrons are more stable than others for instance the noble gases on the right helium neon etc have
These perfect stable electron counts the magic number being 8 in the outer shell and so they’re very stable this also means that the alkali metals like sodium can lose an electron and become a positively charged ion that is stable like neon and it means that the halogens like chlorine can gain an electron and become a negatively charged ion with the same electron
Configuration as argon another noble gas once these elements have this stable outer shell they become much less reactive and this is what makes sodium chloride safe it doesn’t have the raw elements sodium and chlorine in it it has the sodium ion and the chlorine ion each of which are actually quite stable what we have left in the flask is mostly just aerosolized
Table salt along with a bit of ferric chloride chlorine is so corrosive that at the temperature of the reaction it also attacks the steel spoon in a similar fashion this creates ferric chloride which is yellow brown coloring the smoke now let’s give it a try with the element potassium columns on the periodic table are called groups and generally a fairly similar
Properties in the alkali metals group each element as you go down gets more and more reactive and so potassium should be more exciting than sodium thank you while it is more reactive it wasn’t quite reactive enough to light on its own at room temperature so let’s melt it with a blowtorch and then try again the reaction proceeded forward notably faster and hotter
Hot enough to actually crack the glass of this flask the flame is also a bit of a different color as potassium burns with a purple flame while sodium burns with a very bright and distinctive yellow flame you’ve probably seen this distinctive yellow flame old street lights that burned with a noticeable yellow hue are because they were sodium vapor lamps now much
Less common since they’ve been replaced with led bulbs that are much more efficient foreign flask is potassium chloride along with a bit of the same ferric chloride and now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for we’ll try it with the liquid metal sodium potassium alloy mac the knack is so reactive it ignited immediately even at room temperature the knack
Was stored in hexanes which is similar to gasoline and that burned with a thick black soot now as we clean up the snack with some water i like to take this chance to really thank my patrons on patreon you make videos like this possible if you’d like to become a patron please look at the link in my description and you can sign up and i appreciate it a lot otherwise
If you like these videos please like and subscribe there’ll be many more they came from foreign foreign
Transcribed from video
Sodium Explodes in Water – So Why Can We Eat Salt? By nomcopter labs
