Turning Wood into Artificial Silk

In this video I extract pure cellulose from wood and turn it into a famous artificial silk by dissolving it using a homemade copper-based chemical while experiencing the element of suprise and making a corrosive tea.

If you enjoyed the video consider liking it, sharing it with a friend, and subscribing to my channel - I would really appreciate that :)

Also, excuse me for my poor speaking, English is not my native language so I have some trouble with pronunciation, in case you don't understand something there are always subtitles made by me.

0:00 Intro
4:15 Extracting cellulose from wood (Caustic digesting, pulping, bleaching)
13:31 Making copper hydroxide
19:05 Making Schweizer's reagent and turning wood into rayon
23:31 Outro

#chemistry
#experiment
#beautiful
#demonstration
#science
#interesting
#cool
#reaction
#silk
#blue
#colors
#wood
#copper
#paper
#fiber
#fire
#clothing
#textile
#fabric

[theenglishbassist]

Every time i hear the intro music, i instantly expect an Australian man to start yelling at me about how smelly his headphones are.

[jansenart]

Next project: Vinylon, the fabric synthesized from rocks!

[noelbreitenbach]

I’m really really digging this “common household” chemistry arc . It really make you look at our things in a totally new way

[thomasdzubin]

I LOLed at the description of Sodium HypoChlorite as “angry table salt”

[DaftyBoi]

Nial Red ... makes food out of random chemicals with reactions.

Amatuer chemistry .... makes random chemicals look strangly appitizing before they have even finished reacting!

[GerinoMorn]

ThoughtEmporium have built a wet fiber spinning machine - it's pretty much doable with a 3D printer and some electronics, or even by just having it all geared and man-powered. Might be good idea to use their results, as there's a lot of fiddly details with it :D

[Underestimated]

2:25 never thought I’d see someone violate a tree like that… that earns a subscribe for sure

[Maxjoker]

2:25 I've heard of tree hugging, but tree groping? I think that goes to far! Someone call tree HR.

[jeb]

I work at a manufacturing plant that makes cellulose acetate. This is way different from the process we use in industry. This was absolutely fascinating to watch. Thank you for sharing!

[ericcarabetta]

10:00 Damn, a $2, 250 blender. That IS expensive. I didn’t even know they went that high, lol.

[geoffreyentwistle]

A simple suggestion: get cheese cloth for those squeezing needs! It's easily available, and specifically designed to make those squeezing steps much easier than they would be with a more tightly woven cloth. 😊

[saywhatnz]

Came for the science, stayed for the awesome descriptions. "Laboratory-grade wood", "decapitated, and chemically processed, tree corpses", etc.

[DangerousLab]

This chemagician has once again turned wood into another useful material!

[petevenuti]

You can definitely do something tree themed! How would you purify your leftover lignins? What what are some things you could do with them? Also much of that color is tannic acid and iron complexes , tannic acid is definitely a useful product, how do you isolate that?
After those main products there's many other things like Anthocyanins, terpenes, cytokinins, and probably many more you could make videos out of.
Personally I would like to see an anthocyanin and quinine based battery or organic solar cell made from hedge trimmings.

[Herbit-kj]

17:48 you need to do macro shots. there's this trend where people how reactions in a waterdrop with a macro lens and it's absolutely beautiful

[BRUXXUS]

Yes! I love this process and find it so interesting. :) Rayon is such a cool material.
I also love to see that you've been building up your lab supplies. No more taped together pestle . haha

[poknys]

If you want to improve your results you've got two main options : making rayon or making fibranne, but in both cases you'll need to find a way to make your indivual fibers with a diameter of around 50µm (commercially, they tend to be 20µm in diameter).
Next use it to make rayon or fibranne, the key difference here lies in the way the fiber are used tu make a thread. Rayon uses long individual fiber stranded together while fibranne uses short fibers holded togother via torsion (just like wool).
Maybe you could try to make fibranne first, as it should be easier to get short but thinner fibers that youcould then twist by hand. Nighthawkinlight made a really cool serie of videos about making self-cooling fabric using a candy machine for his proof of concept (maybe not really usable here due to the acid bath, but that's a start)

And a last thing, viscose is really sensible to humidity and can lose up to 50% of its strength when wet, so drying the fibers firts is crucial.

Anyway, great video as always can't wait to see how you'll succeed to improve the process !

[Nocare]

That is a $1500 blender you just did that with lol

[Six_Gorillion]

Trees are so cool. You can make anything out of em. Can't believe they just grow on trees. What are the odds and how lucky are we?

[rocketlauncher]

So I've seen wood turn transparent, bulletproof, into nitric acid, into alum and now silk