Junk_Enginerd
Hazard to Others
Posts: 251
Registered: 26-5-2019
Location: Sweden
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Extract phosphorescent substance from glow in the dark plastics?
I'm after a small amount of phosphorescent substance, ideally not water soluble. Wanna use to to make benzyl alcohol phosphorescent in presence of
water, a lava lamp basically.
I could buy it, but it's a bit of a hassle with sipping etc. And I like a challenge. Also, I've got plenty of glow in the dark toys I could steal
from the kids. Most notably my daughter's pacifiers lol. She's about old enough that we will be throwing them away soon anyway. But, it's one hell of
a tough plastic. I've made some attempts with one of them and it won't budge under boiling oil, acetone, xylene nor ethyl acetate.
Now, I'm sure I could dissolve or otherwise disintegrate the plastic in quite a few ways, but the question is how "violent" I can get before the
phosphorescent material is destroyed.
Is it typically ZnS or SrS in all of these consumer product glow in the dark products? How might one extract it from plastic? What chemicals would
certainly ruin the phosporescent? Acids? Bases? Heat?
There's no clue on the pacifiers, but obviously it's gonna be some quite inert stuff to sit in baby mouths, so I assume HDPE or something.
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clearly_not_atara
International Hazard
Posts: 2801
Registered: 3-11-2013
Member Is Offline
Mood: Big
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It's practically always strontium aluminate, SrAl2O4. Iron ruins it. Unfortunately, many solvents contain small quantities of iron. The good news is
that Fe2+ usually won't diffuse into the crystals that quickly.
Polyethylene is highly resistant to solvents that are even a little polar. However, it has been noted to dissolve in trichlorobenzene at high
temperatures.
Paradichlorobenzene is widely available and might be an effective solvent; it melts at 50 C and boils at 174 C, so I'd consider refluxing PDCB since
polyethylene seems like a likely possibility for any baby-stuff.
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