SUPER new to chemistry, need help!

This forum is generally happier to answer specific questions. A good place to learn is Wikipedia. Webelements provides information about elements. Then there is my email address, lakraskci@hotmail.com.

Don't post your email address online like that. Spam bots can see it and will latch onto you like the parasitic leaches they are. Break it up with spaces and use (at) rather than @ and (dot) rather than .

Chemworker, did you do chemistry at school or university? There are vast repositories of information about it online. Wikipedia is often looked down on but it's also one of the easiest to crawl through if you're not a student or academic, as most solid evidence for scientific work is in the journals. And journals are real expensive, particularly if you're only trying to view one article. It can cost $20->$30 to download a single article, which can then turn out to be useless as you can't replicate the materials or equipment they've used, or it contains nothing you didn't already know. Students and academics have the luxury of an Athens (or similar) account, which is an account the university buys that lets them have universal access to a cluster of journals. But on the positive side, the journals usually contain much more advanced ideas that are too hard to repeat at home anyway; unless you have dedicated all of your spare money to buying equipment over years or decades as one or two here have.

If you've not done much chemistry academically, it would be worth your while grabbing some text books aimed at the level you left it. Time does stand still in terms of what people know, so there's no point trying to read a book aimed at a graduate chemist without knowing the things it's assuming you already know.

If you want to get busy in the meantime with some inorganic reactions, extracting the components from an alkaline battery can be fun, it's not too hard, doesn't require any special equipment, the level of chemistry knowledge involved isn't high but it still contains a lot of useful information that's applicable to lots of other things and methods of working which are also used for many other things and you get quite a sizeable lump of useful stuff out the other end; manganese and zinc salt.

The dirty mess of a stripped lantern battery, stewing away. They look terrible, but what's happening inside the thoroughly cleaned and cling filmed jars is actually very clean. There wasn't a single hair inside them. I'd also scrubbed the casings with sulphuric acid and then pickled them, then rinsed and immediately dropped them in there, to expose a fresh, clean surface.


Some time and filtering later, I have a pile of well roasted zinc sulphate from the casings. I later turned a small amount of this into the sulphide. Dropping hydrochloric onto the sulphide will release hydrogen sulphide gas, which stinks of rotten eggs and sewers and it's useful for other reactions; but there are easier ways of making hydrogen sulphide than this, I'm only mentioning it as a demonstration. More correctly, sewers and eggs stink of hydrogen sulphide, as that's what the smell is, but in a low concentration.


The manganese is harder work, as it comes premixed with KOH electrolyte, activated carbon and iron contamination. The chloride should be pink. This is what it looks like filtered, it was black with activated carbon beforehand. It's now a mucky brown / yellow from all the iron chloride contaminating it.


The challenge is, make it look like bubblegum.


All it took was some clean, empty jars, coffee filters, some drain cleaner (NaOH / KOH), sulphuric (battery acid) and hydrochloric acid (there's a brand of it sold in the UK that is simply colourless, concentrated acid without any surfactants in it). You could just use one acid if you like; sulphuric for batteries is always cleaner than the concentrated versions of both it's self and hydrochloric, and it's available from more places.

One reason this is a valuable practical is that manganese is useful in electrochemistry and catalysis, yet the normal sources of it are contaminated. I bought a bottle of "99%" pure manganese dioxide from eBay a few months back and, after using it, it was obvious it was cut with something. Something that looked a lot like activated carbon. If I'd filtered it, it'd probably be brown as well. Meaning it's not 99% pure, it's waste from a battery recycling plant.

Someone else buying it from eBay found his was cut with sand, which will have been done intentionally.

If I want much more pure manganese dioxide again, I can just heat this chloride in the air. Although I made this to use it as a dopant. I have much more expensive chemistry equipment, but enjoy trying to make do without. I was doing this battery thing with the aim of others who aren't primarily interested in chemistry being able to repeat it, as some of them wanted the products of the process for their main hobby (electronics). There's also no point caking more expensive equipment with battery paste when it doesn't need it.

Drying, not black or brown, manganese chloride;


[Edited on 28-5-2011 by peach]