[ohlala (OP)]

Hi everyone!


I really hope someone in a science forum can finally help me. I don't know where else to ask this but I am to conduct an experiment on the behaviour of liquid metals in different environments (I'm using copper, aluminium and iron). But I have no idea what to conduct the experiment with? There's a gas dosing system, which allows different gas mixtures (hence, different environments) and then there's also the good old dilatometer, which is usually used for thermal analysis. Which would you use??


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[chiralSPO]

This really depends on what you are trying to do and what you are hoping to see. Presumably both setups are stable and useful at the temperatures required (Al melts at only 660 °C, but copper's melting point is over 1000 °C, and iron's is over 1500 °C)


Which gases are you thinking of using? (liquid aluminum is likely to react with oxygen, water, carbon dioxide, NOx, SOx, and other easily reduced species, possible violently) And what pressure range do you want to explore?


Are you hoping to see a chemical reaction, or are you interested in physical phenomena?

[evan_au]

dilatometer

I had to look it up:

A dilatometer is a scientific instrument that measures volume changes caused by a physical or chemical process. A familiar application of a dilatometer is the mercury-in-glass thermometer, in which the change in volume of the liquid column is read from a graduated scale.

Beware of using a mercury-in-glass thermometer on substances that have a higher melting point than glass.

Unless you are testing mercury or gallium, you will need some form of crucible. An infra-red thermometer will help (unless the crucibe has an inbuilt thermocouple).

Some thoughts on safety:

• The Group I metals have relatively low melting points, but are ferociously reactive.
• The Group II metals are also pretty reactive.
• So stay away from these!

Flush oxygen from the work area, or you will only be testing reactions with oxygen (hard if you are heating it with a bunsen burner!). Bear in mind that oxygen-free areas are invisibly deadly.
Fumes may escape, so ensure the apparatus is well-ventilated.
And don't do this at home...
   

[Kryptid]

Electrically-conducting fluids (like liquid metals) are capable of producing magnetic fields when in motion. Perhaps you could perform experiments testing the magnetic properties of the metals when they spin in a vortex.

[chiralSPO]

Bismuth is a non-toxic, unreactive, and reasonably cheap metal that melts at only 270 °C (interestingly, it is like water in that the liquid form is denser than the solid form). If you allow it to cool slowly, it can form beautiful labyrinthine "hopper" crystals (google image search for bismuth).


Zinc is also non-toxic, reasonably unreactive and quite cheap metal that melts at 420 °C, which is hotter than bismuth, but still much easier to handle than molten aluminum.