Iron Sulfide

hey everyone and welcome back to the lab today I'll be making iron sulfide from the elements before I get started I'd like to say uh I was hesitant initially to film this video just simply because this is an extremely simple procedure it's in basically every inorganic chemistry textbook it's been done on YouTube a million times it's kind of a dead horse that uh that I'm beating again here but I find myself here prepping for a bigger video uh which by the way I'm trying to come out with a new video every Sunday in all of 2018 so I'll be doing a lot of weekly prep work such as this and here I am on a Thursday night making a bunch of iron sulfide thinking why am I not filming this and I thought of the old uh adage which is very true in chemistry 1 hour in the library saves four hours in the laboratory and that is completely true I can't tell you how many organic syntheses I've done where beforehand I've read through 8 10 even 12 papers of people who've had to do this because somewhere along the line there's someone who had to make a whole bunch of it at some point and they opt imiz that process and they have some secret trick that you can use that saves you tons of prep tons of laboratory time tons of cleaning glassware things like that so I decided to go ahead and uh and film and produce the iron sulfide video in hopes that someone might use this video for the tricks that may be contained here in also I haven't seen anyone make iron sulfide quite on the scale and I'm about to do it today so anyway uh without further Ado iron sulfide enjoy okay so to make the iron sulfide you simply need a simetric mixture of iron and sulfur both in powdered form those are mixed together very well and then lit on fire and uh once ignited they burn with sort of a smoldering reaction with blue sulfur flames on top and at the end you're left with a solid sort of centered chunk of iron sulfide which you can then pulverize that and use it and I'll be using it in an upcoming video for making hydrogen sulfide now there's a couple caveats uh number one you can't use iron powder bigger than about 200 mesh now mesh size refers to the particle size of the iron I have this 200 mesh iron laying around for laboratory use for doing things like for instance a clemenson reduction which involves iron in HCL now if I had iron powder like dust or filings for instance those have very high surface areas and although they're very good for doing reductions like that because of their high surface area there's an activation process that's necessary prior to the reduction which involves soaking this in uh hydrochloric acid and you end up losing a lot of iron with sulfate in your product uh when you go ahead and do things like that so I tend to use the larger Lar mesh size iron like this for organic chemistry whereas this iron powder that you can buy on eBay and I got both of them on eBay I guess but this is just iron powder for like magnetic experiments and it's a much finer powder it's not quite dust which I've also seen but that's very expensive this is just sort of like iron filings and it will work just fine now I don't particularly need good alloy control of this because even if there are additional Metals um when I'm making hydrogen sulfide excess sulfur won't matter because it won't react with the iron will react with the acid but the excess won't really matter because it's just going to produce excess hydrogen which is inert to the reaction I'll be using uh and if there any other metals in the iron powder they'll end up either as the sulfide just like the iron or as just the base metal and again the acid reacting with either of those is going to be inconsequential if it reacts with the sulfide it'll be more hydrogen sulfide if it reacts with the uh with the metal it'll just be more hydrogen if it reacts at all so you can use pretty much any dirty old iron for this product here isn't going to be particularly pure uh but it will suffice for what I'll be using it for so anyway I'm going to shut up and we can go to the laboratory and uh and do this okay so I've got the ingredients measured out here I've determined that I wanted to make 200 g of iron sulfide to store in the laboratory for future use in making hydrogen sulfide particularly so that will require 127 gr of iron powder and 73 G of Sulfur powder stochiometrically um and I'm going to mix them in this Steel container here now this is just an empty I think quart size paint can this works perfectly for this job you can toss both ingredients in here snap the lid on Shake It Up really well to make sure the ingredients are completely mixed and then you can loosen the lid ignite the contents outside of course uh the reaction will take place and it'll cool down protected from the elements by the lid at which point bring it back inside and knock the uh the iron sulfide out grind it up and put it in a container so that's the plan I'm going to go ahead and add those components to The Container now there they are I'll snap the lid down and begin mixing

okay should be able to see now that the powders are indeed well mixed take a sample out into the light you can see it's pretty much homogeneous and that means that we're ready to go I'm just going to get a piece of fuse and stick it in there and then we can take this outside and light it on fire okay so I lock a little bit in the last clip I'm actually going to do it inside I was outside but I stepped out and it was pouring rain and it's uh pitch black out there obviously because this time of winter in the northern hemisphere did not expect it to be raining because it's the middle of January in Michigan so um yeah anyway since the weather is poor I've decided to set up my fume Hood now you probably haven't seen this fume Hood unless you've watched the very beginning video of this entire Channel um and this fum mud is pretty interesting it's sort of sloppily put together right now but you can see this Hood piece here hinges up and it actually attaches to the ceiling so you don't normally see it locks to the bench and then there's these side pieces that slide in now there's tracks down there that the side pieces slide into but the boards are so warped at this point that they no longer slide in so you might be able to see that there are some pretty big gaps around the edges here that uh aren't filled in anymore but it's still good for what it's supposed to do it will pull all the fumes out um from doing this I've got the can with the reaction mixture on it set up on a fire brick and that'll protect the table and I'm going to go ahead and fuse this up and uh and touch it off and we can go ahe and do it with the lid off this time because there's nothing really to protect it from see how well we can see through that I guess I'll leave it up unless it gets too Smokey fuse all right so here's a bit of fuse I'm going to pack the powder down a little bit okay and then we will insert the fuse and uh hope I don't burn my house down here we go I'll leave it up for now you can see how efficiently that smoke is getting extracted okay so unfortunately the fuse did not light the mixture um it looks like it kind of fell out of the mixture and sort of zoomed around inside there rather than actually lighting it so I'm going to do this the old fashion way and just uh hit it with the old propane torch I think that'll do it you can see the blue sulfur Flames I actually turned the light off that'd be kind of cool you can see the paint starting to burn off the can this it's getting awfully hot and the mixture inside if I can bring the camera up is actually glowing you can see there as it slowly Burns you can see the outside of the can getting really hot as the reaction progresses around it'll be cool when the reaction gets to this side oh here we go it's really G now I'm actually going to unplug my temperature controller I forgot I oops forgot I left it in there we go and that's about it and in there we should be able to see yep there some hot some really hot iron sulfide now I'm actually going to put the uh the lid on to minimize this contact with the atmosphere although it really doesn't matter and that will uh just sort of protect it a little bit while it cools

down you can hear it crackling as it cools down and splits up it's still quite a bit of heat coming off but I can feel it on my face all right so the can has now cooled almost completely it's still just barely warm on the bottom but certainly cool enough to touch when I open it up you see inside that there's just a hard crust of uh iron sulfide that's pretty much a giant brick so what I'm going to do is put the lid back on and shake the crap out of it again to pulverize it up and then uh store it in a jar that's basically it so there's our iron sulfide they go ahead and label this all right and here's the final product it is a dark Brown to blackish uh fine powder mixed with some hard lumps consisting primarily of iron sulfite now this is just under 200 g which is enough to make um just under three moles of hydrogen sulfide which is plenty uh for the videos I have that are coming up so I look forward to doing that I'm trying to come out with a new video every Sunday in 2018 plus some on the weekdays such as this one which involves some of the smaller preparations that I need to make for some of those videos as I mentioned earlier in the video but uh yeah that's about it for uh IR sulfide hey if you like this video as much as I like making it please press the like button if you want to see more videos especially the Sunday videos in 2018 please press the Subscribe button if you'd like to become a patron um you can get your name in the credits of a video uh just go ahead I'll put a link in the description to my patreon page thank you to the January patrons by the way for uh making these videos possible however the credits for your donations will not appear in January videos only in February videos um after that uh month is that fiscal month has ended that's just how patreon Works anyway uh thanks for watching