Lab Notes - I Found the Best Way of Making Sodium Metal

This video is purely theoretical and does NOT contain any actual experiments. It it also quite redundant in terms of content because I did not write any scripts and made up the contents along the way.
Making sodium metal is always one of the great achievements of amateur chemistry. Today I attempt to tackle the problem by comparing various methods of sodium production based on many aspects such as mechanism, cost, safety, labor and generalization, and concluding a single method that works best: Room-temperature Electrolysis.

[-r-]

PC from PG and Urea should be well thought through, especially regarding the ratios and how to control the temperature to ensure that PC is not too contaminated with byproducts.
Hope you‘ll get to see the world sometime thanks to your work.

[xerolad]

I've never been able to get the alcohol catalyzed Mg reduction method to work. The humidity is so ridiculously high where I live that I just can't get my materials dry enough. I tried it first with menthol, then isoborneol, and it never worked for me.

[KapitanWalnut]

Awesome synopsis! Thanks for sharing! Do you have a link to the paper/source you were following for the room temp electrolysis?

[nikolayboev]

Being in lab (even garage lab) I'd prefer molten NaOH electrolysis to both of these methods. May be require some energy, but still cheaper (than producing/purchasing AlCl3 and PC) and more scalable.

[_arthurski]

Do you think it would be possible to extract sodium from mercury/sodium amalgam ?
The amalgam is "easily" generated via the Castner–Kellner process.
What do you think ? ISTR it is easy to extract silver from Hg/Ag amalgam.

[YunfeiLiang-gndu]

I tried the RT electrolysis method, the corrosion of anode is a big problem, it contaminates the solution.mmo anode will be better but relatively hard to get.

[bpark]

Could you make AlCl3 with HCL & Al, dry, & add to the cell? Run cell to electrolyze off the H2O until hydrogen fizzing stops at the cathode, then sodium will start coming off?
With Al anode, will AlCL3 accumulate in the cell ultimately leading to the deposition of aluminum at the cathode?

[cammanvlogs]

Are you going to perform and upload this experiment yourself?

[Preyhawk]

Interesting fact early sodium production reduced sodiumhydroxide with ironcarbid and destilled the sodium over. the ironcarbid is made by heating ironpowder with tar (coke it).If you have an cast iron retorte or steel or some other heat resistant material it would work at home because the reaction accours at 400C

[petevenuti]

Here in the states gas water heaters use a sacrificial anode to protect from corrosion and it's often made out of magnesium (sometimes an alloy that includes aluminum or a little zinc), I don't know what's used in China(or wherever you are with a Californian-esq accent), but I hope that might be useful to know..

[okterplumus]

I didn't know about tihs electrolysis of NaAlCl4 in propylene cabonate solution at room temperature. Very interesting. I found a paper about a methode that works with beta-alumina as as diaphragm. It works at 300°C and has a high current efficiency.

[ejkozan]

Interesting video! But some terrible color text choices XD white text on the photo background is unreadable
In the case of half electrode reactions, aq meant AQUEOUS, I understand you wanted to show it is in solution, but aq has its defined meaning in chemistry and it means water solution.
It is funny we discussed on discord something like that maybe two days ago XD but with perchorates :P
Can not wait for video of process! How sodium deposits on electrode? it plates and need to be scratched, or it forms dendrides? it is more crystaline or blobby? More or less from what you showed, AlCl3 would be produced and its concentration would increase with use of cell, then can it be used continuously just by adding more and more NaCl? of course Al electrode would be consumable. What is temperature of cell running? How it behaves in higher ones? Can it be run in melting point of sodium temp, so it could be automatically collected? Ok, i think those are all questions i have XD