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Greetings fellow nerds.
Normally to dry chemicals you just leave them out or heat them up.
But some chemicals like this dysprosium nitrate
are so hygroscopic that they continually absorb water from the air
and remain liquid even after months.
Even worse, you can't heat it up to dry
because it decomposes even with slight heating.
For these extremely delicate chemicals,
you'll need a device called a desiccator.
In this video, we'll make desiccator bag.
The process is brutally simple.
First get a plastic soft-drink container
and cut it down to approximately the same height
as the chemical containers you intend to use.
Make sure it's completely dry.
Now fill it half way with a drying agent.
You can use beads of silica gel or sodium hydroxide.
I personally prefer sodium hydroxide since it also absorbs acidic gases
like nitrogen dioxide, hydrogen chloride and carbon dioxide.
Now simply place both the substance you want to dry
and the drying agent in the same resealable bag
and make sure it's airtight.
What happens is the drying agent is much more hygroscopic
than your target chemical.
So it will make the air in the bag so dry
that your target chemical will be forced to start drying out.
After a week or two, the target chemical is dry.
And there it is.
Now sometimes the top part of the chemical
dries out before the bottom part,
so you should poke your chemical with a glass rod and grind it.
If it's still mushy underneath then grind it thoroughly
to expose as much of it as possible
and then put it back in the bag.
Repeat this process as often as needed.
To save time you can also put in multiple substances
in the same bag as long as any gases they produce
and their solvents are the same.
Eventually, when you grind them
they should crumble into solid, dry, powders.
Now the drying agent itself will not last forever.
In the case of sodium hydroxide the indication is pretty obvious,
if it liquefies it should be replaced,
and if it starts eating through it's container like this,
it definitely needs to be replaced as well as the container.
Silica gel that has blue color indicator beads will turn pink when they're done.
In the case of uncolored beads you'll just need to eyeball it
and replace the beads when it stops drying properly.
So that's how you make a desiccator bag. Not the coolest thing,
but extremely important if you're serious about chemistry.
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