Making Sodium Iodide

[jdurg]

Hey guys. This past week I had some free time and decided to make some sodium iodide from my extra sodium metal and iodine. I photographed the entire experiment and have written an article for it at a website I help run. I thought I'd mention it to you guys here since we seem to have a lot of people here who like to do little experiments like this every now and then. The article can be found at this link which is the website I work at.

[Silencer]

You switch from first to third person a lot.

 

Neat experiment, though.

[woelen]

This is fun! What is remarkable is that in the second experiment in the new vial, you did not get copious amounts of I2-vapor. I have done such an experiment with magnesium and iodine. I also want to try with calcium and iodine. I have 75 grams of pea-sized granules of Ca-metal, so this experiment should be possible quite well with the little granules. The latter may be more dangerous, so I have to think carefully about how to do this. The Mg/I2 reaction was initiated by water, can the calcium reaction also be initiated with water?

[budullewraagh]

i think that the calcium would react rather quickly with the water, so you'll end up with a whole lot of calcium hydroxide.

[jdurg]

You switch from first to third person a lot.

 

Neat experiment' date=' though.[/quote']

 

 

Thank you. Yeah, I'm a science person and writing is just a byproduct of mine. I was just writing what went through my head.

 

The experiment was fun, however. In the initial vial, I had a LOT more iodine vapor in there, yet a lot of it leaked out when the vial cracked so a good deal of the iodine was lost. In the second vial, I decided to just add the iodine slowly to the hot/molten sodium. That worked a LOT better and resulted in less iodine vapor. I was happy to see that most of the sodium reacted with the iodine and not the occasional drop of water I put in there to accelerate the reaction. It didn't take much vinegar at all to neutralize the final solution.