Justonium

For one thing, potassium sulfate is pretty soluble in water so your procedure would not work. As for the stability of copper chlorate, I believe it should be stable at room temperature, but I've never read anything about that compound in particular so I guess anything is possible. If you were to try to make it via a precipitation reaction, you would need to find out how soluble copper chlorate is, and then work from there to create a situation in which when a chlorate solution and a copper solution mix, the copper chlorate's solubility differs significantly from that of the other salt, so that it can be separated via filtration if it is less soluble, or purified by repeated crystalizations of the less soluble salt if it is more soluble. I suspect that it isn't very soluble in water, but again, only experimentation can tell for sure.

I believe it's silver chloride. I have a little experience in photography, and I remember hearing silver chloride mentioned. Silver chloride slowly, very slowly, decomposes when exposed to light, ultraviolet in particular, into chlorine gas as well as silver metal that is seen as black/dark gray because its crystals are so small. I once made some rudimentary photosensitive paper myself, and all I did was coat ordinary printer paper with silver chloride. It worked brilliantly, although it did require a lengthy exposure time to pick up a good image. EDIT: Cripes, this thread is old!

I'm not sure how to intergrate that; when I try 'u' substitution, representing the (x^2) as 'u', I can't get the 'du' in there: du = (d/dx)u = (d/dx)(x^2) = 2xdx There is no 'x' term in the expression, however, so that is where I get stuck.

I made a little over gram of relatively pure sodium by lighting a mixture of powdered sodium hydroxide and powdered magnesium in a well cooled crucible with poor ventilation. I also ended up ruining the crucible with this method, as the extreme temperature changes that it was subjected to caused it to crack apart. Not a safe experiment to do at home, but I'm just pointing out that it's completely possible for sodium to be synthesized at home. I will not give the equation or the formula for this reaction, lest I encourage people who think they have enough experience to perform this. This is VERY DANGEROUS, and I was very far away from this crucible during the entire reaction. Being near it could result in splattering a very hot, very reactive molten mixture of sodium and sodium hydroxide onto your body, which will commence to burn and eat away at any skin that it touches. The only purpose of this post is to point out that it is possible to synthesize sodium at home.

All of the responses in the main post seemed to me to be completely focused around the question: "How does this affect me?" This seemed to me to be looking for selfish excuses to do the right thing (not that that's a bad idea). But the way I see it, there's no greater importance of one person's happiness over any other person's, and so one of the motivators for me to help others is to remember that self is just an illusion, and that really, everything is all about just benefiting everybody's existences as much as possible, without regard to who it is, as long as the most people possible are benefited with the least possible harm done. To explain what I mean by saying that self is just an illusion, I'm going to create a little hypothetical scenario. Imagine that one day you switched consciousnesses with your friend. You're thoughts, memories, and personality; everything that is physically encoded into your body, stayed where it was, and your friend's likewise. The only thing that changed for you was that suddenly, you were you're friend. Neither you or you're friend would ever notice that anything at all peculiar had happened, and would go on continuing each others' lives as the other person. Is a scenario like this possible? What I'm trying to get at is that it doesn't matter. If you remove yourself from this incident, and look onto it as an outsider, would you say that this swap in consciousnesses has done the universe any worse or better? Both people still instill the exact same experiences into their consciousnesses, and while one may have swapped for the better and one for the worse, the exact same experiences still occur. As an outsider, one might be tempted to say that this swap is unnatural and wrong, and one would not normally volunteer to switch consciousnesses with another, but in this case, nobody was the wiser, so I see no wrong done, or even any relevance of considering whether there was a swap or not. My point is that each person's experiences get experienced. Who actually experiences them is quite irrelevant, because the entire sense of self is merely a creation of the mind.

To help it dry faster, you can put it in a sealed bag along with some calcium chloride pellets (in another container) which can be bought from Home Depot for absorbing moisture from inside kitchen cabinets. This works best if you added close to equimolar proportions of ammonia and hydrochloric acid, but might be more difficult if you added too much ammonia. What i would do would be to add hydrochloric acid again after I passed the equivalence point, so that there is excess acid, and then dry it using solid sodium hydroxide as a dessicant. This stuff is horrible to get on you're skin though, so don't use if you aren't trained in handling it safely. I'm not sure how hydroscopic ammonium chloride is, but if it's not hydroscopic, then you might be able to just omit the dessication bag and just leave it out in the air. The thing that peeves me then, though, is that dust is landing in the solution while it dries, contaminating it. For highest purity, use excess acid and sodium hydroxide to dessicate it.

Sodium metal is very useful for making sodium amide, which can then be used to make azides. Lead azide is one of the most practical primary explosives. Also, the reason people love throwing sodium metal into water so much is because it's fascinating that something will actually react with water, which is normally considered somewhat inert, so vigorously that it explodes. =) When I thew a bunch of sodium beads into water on my driveway, i got lots of cheers from my audience lol.

I'm still watching for responses. (Just clarifying that this thread is not old.)

It's the electrode. It's getting oxidized instead of the chloride ions in the solution. To oxidize these, you will need a non reactive electrode. Try graphite. Also, as you're cell runs, chlorine production will soon stop, as the solution becomes more basic. You will then be making hypochlorite ions instead. To prevent this, you need to separate the solutions by the anode and by the cathode. You can complete the circuit easily enough with a salt bridge--a sliced hotdog or a cloth soaked in electrolyte will work OK.

No, I'm afraid that wouldn't work lol.

I suppose I should have been more descriptive. The cathode would sit in cupric nitrate solution, and the silver would hang in sodium nitrate solution. The solutions would be connected by a salt bridge also containing sodium nitrate. As the cell runs, sodium ions in the anode solution should be replaced by silver ions, and the copper ions in the cathode solution should be replaced by sodium ions as they plate out. The reason I would use copper nitrate is that I don't want hydrogen to get reduced, lest a small amount of hydroxide ions find their way through the salt bridge and coat the silver anode with insoluble silver hydroxide. Any other people who think this process would work? It does not work with dissolving aluminum instead of silver, by the way; the aluminum just gets coated with oxide and the cell looses current.

OK, instead of using hot nitric acid to dissolve old fine silver jewelry, would it work to just hang the cleaned jewelry in a solution of copper nitrate and use it as an anode? The copper would plate out on the cathode, and the silver would go into solution, right? What I'm worried about is that an oxide layer might coat the silver and stop the process. Is this method feasable, or do I need pure nitric acid? Mine's contaminated with hydrochloric that I'm too lazy to remove.

The regenerator should be as small as possible to maximize efficiency, but you will have to compromise size with functionality. Personally, I never bothered to make one, I never needed efficiency in my Stirling engine; I was only making it rotate a CD and look nice on my shelf, not perform a task.

The higher the temperature difference, the higher the efficiency, I'd say. The only limit to this trend is that you start losing a lot of efficiency if its so hot that the heat leaks out, but in a simple home made Stirling engine, you should not have to worry about that kind of limit. You just don't want to have so much heat that part of you're engine melts. I've made one before, and 2 cylinders of the same size works fine, the real deciding factor is the cycle you design for you're pistons. I use a sinusoidal cycle in which the hot side is one fourth of a period ahead of the cold side, just because of the simplicity of design using parts made from paperclips, but if you need to increase efficiency further, you can have both of you're piston rods connected to circular tracks in a disc which is spun by their pushes and pulls. You can design the track to have the optimal cycle for a 2 cylinder Stirling engine, which you can find online (I've seen videos on Youtube depicting it, calculated it using a computer program). This would be VERY difficult, however, and you don't get that much worse efficiency just using a regular sinusoidal cycle.

The user NurdRage has a pretty good video on the procedure you are trying, UC.