Separate something I want to work on from the dross its mixed with, and then first purify it, followed by making out with the lithium, ethanol, pentane, potassium or sodium hydroxide and some ether.
Also, go to the next stage of refining the manganese content from a load of old, dead batteries, having already separated out the carbon black from its crude form as gouged straight from the batteries, and converted it to the soluble manganese (II) sulfate by leaching it in concentrated sulfuric acid, and left it for a week or so for the insoluble carbon black to settle out of the solution of manganese sulfate to the bottom of a beaker, then decanted off the sulfate, bar a little carbon black that floated to the top and stubbornly refused to sink, thats mostly skimmed off. First, it will be treated with aqueous caustic potash, reforming MnO2, manganese dioxide, and then treated, after roasting to drive off any traces of organics, under the flame of a blowtorch leaving only MnO2 and inorganic carbon, the traces that wouldn't sink in the beaker, or that floated up when handling the beaker and that were not removed by skimming the carbon scum off the surface.
This will then be added with extreme care, in a solution of strong sulfuric acid, to a solution composed of strong sulfuric acid, and aqueous hydrogen peroxide. The combination of H2SO4 and hydrogen peroxide gives what is commonly known as 'piranha acid' or 'piranha bath', alternately 'Caro's acid', peroxymonosulfuric acid, which, as the name piranha acid might tell one, is extremely corrosive, being both very acidic and one of the strongest common oxidizing agents around that doesn't involve anything really exotic. Its used for, after first removing any traces of organics (contact with organic compounds causes piranha acid to explode violently), and when your glassware has nothing left but inorganic carbon, metal traces and such being acceptable also with great care, cleaning glassware of intractable stains and/or restoring it to utmost cleanliness, acid piranha (base piranha also is known and used, somewhat safer than piranha acid, but I'm not so familiar with base piranha, made with H2O2 and sodium or potassium hydroxide, never used it, and I wouldn't be surprised one bit if its capable of damaging glass or eroding it)
Persulfuric acid will oxidize even inorganic carbon deposits to CO2 gas, literally evaporating the most tenacious and grimly resistant, intractable stains from your glassware. The peroxide I'll use will be weak, because manganese dioxide oxidizes hydrogen peroxide to water and O2, as do many other transition metal salts. Chances are the result will be manganese persulfate. This would be either roasted or treated with more aqueous KOH or NaOH to produce manganese dioxide yet again, but now free of carbon. Then mixed with aluminium or magnesium dust, in a spare crucible that is disposable, or a spare piece of refractory fireclay gouged into a holder for the mixture, and ignited with a piece of burning magnesium on the end of a stick, in an environment free of oxygen, displaced with and as such full of argon, because manganese metal is actually very reactive for a transition metal. The reaction that follows will generate intense heat, and go as such: MnO2+2Mg-/\>Mn+2MgO
-- (thats meant to be a letter delta in ASCII, standing for the activation energy of the reaction, which is significant with metallothermic reductions [thermite-like redox reactions]. You need quite a lot of heat to initiate a thermite or thermite-type reduction, but once initiated it is self sustaining and will not go out until it has jolly well finished, and doesn't give a fuck how much you may want one to go out, it'll stay there and burn like fury until the metal oxide you started with has been reduced to the metal, and the metal you started with is oxidized to the corresponding oxide. They can burn under water, or even in a vacuum once initiated, because metallothermic reductions require no external source of oxygen to burn, but they supply their own oxygen by means of the starting metal ripping the oxygen from the metal oxide you started with, and burn like hellfire)
Difficult to ignite, nigh impossible to stop once lit. They don't explode (save for copper oxide based thermites which go off fast and violently) but burn rapidly yet steadily, and give out so much heat in doing so that they will melt, or even burn straight through steel, although both the speed of burn and how much heat given out depends on the particle size of the reductant and the metal oxide, the finer the faster, and the heat given off depends on the melting point of the metal being released IIRC)
Thermite itself, iron oxide and aluminium powder, is used to burn through/cut railway line sections, and also to weld them and weld other things if the thermite be held in a suspended mold composed of refractory firebrick, sand, fireclay type materials etc, with a small hole at the bottom, so that the slag stays inside the mold and the molten metal runs out and fills what you wish it to fill. Its also been used in many military applications, that involve incendiaries owing to the intense heat of the redox reaction, the molten metal released and the general mess of things thermite is capable of making, to say nothing of what it will do to equipment.
Why do I want it personally in this case? not for destroying anything, rather, so I can perform the reaction as the final step in refining the battery-grade manganese dioxide, through the sulfate and reforming the dioxide again, until ultimately refining it to actual elemental manganese metal. Why? because I haven't got any, I want it for an element collection, and as an aside, I've never actually used/handled/seen elemental Mn, only used its compounds. I just want to prepare a piece of pure, metallic manganese fit for the element collection to be, which I can hold in my hand, and seal under inert gas for the Mn section of the element collection, to, when finished, be hung upon the lab wall, displaying everything possible, and having placeholders for francium and astatine which at any time, have an atom or two present, created as daughter nuclides given the intense radioactivity and very short half-life of Fr and At both, preclude the physical possibility, never mind safety, of actually keeping it. It cannot be done, best one can do is have a sample of an ore or other precursor which continually creates a few atoms at any one time through radioactive decay chains of other elements. But otherwise, everything from hydrogen to at least uranium, including the various different allotropes of the elements which have them and which are storable, with carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus having the most of all different allotropic forms and polymorphs (for example, graphite, several different crystalline structures of diamond, fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, sulfur occuring as S8 in nature, and probably 30+ different allotropes, whilst selenium and tellurium below one and two periods respectively from sulfur have three and two allotropes each, grey, an amorphous form and red selenium, and both amorphous, and visually stunningly beautiful semimetal form of tellurium, which has to be one of my favourite elements in terms of appearance. And for phosphorus there are red, with quite a few polymorphic variants, all reddish, nontoxic although flammable, producing a lot of smoke when burnt, chemically of modest reactivity, powdery, stable with respect to air, at least cubic and monoclinic white phosphorus, clear when freshly melted under chromic anhydride in sulfuric acid but almost always white due to a surface oxide layer, soft, white to orange depending on how oxidized a sample is, waxy, possessing a distinct garlicky odour, displays a greenish, lurid luminescent glow in the dark, extremely poisonous, and white phosphorus ignites spontaneously in the presence of oxygen. There is also black phosphorus, in at least cubic and monoclinic crystalline black phosphorus, possibly also orthorhombic forms, extremely unreactive, quite difficult to produce, with a lamellar molecular structure, like graphite, which cleaves anisotropically, along the plane of the layers, electrically conductive, nontoxic, nonflammable afaik, most synths need high temperature and very very high pressures to create it. Then there are violet phosphorus, made by dissolving phosphorus in molten lead, in a sealed, evacuated or inert-gas filled vessel and over the course, depending on who's route you follow, of 17 hours to a week or even as long as ten days, carefully lowering the temperature to room temperature, starting at IIRC a little over 500 degrees 'C, and having a zone in the tube maintained at IIRC 480, then depending on the route, subliming the violet, alpha-metallic allotrope known as Hittorf's or violet phosphorus in small platelet-like crystals onto the cooler region of the evacuated tube, and slowly, slowly slowly cooling, or again, infintesimally slowly cooling the molten lead the phosphorus is dissolved in until its at room temperature, before dissolving the lead away with nitric acid to reveal crystals of violet phosphorus. And there is one other well-ish known of allotrope, scarlet phosphorus, which may, possibly be simply an extremely finely divided red phosphorus polymorph, but then again may not, not sure there, that is prepared by slowly crystallizing red phosphorus out of phosphorus tribromide. Or possibly white phosphorus out of carbon disulfide under the influence of irradiation with UV light, in the absence of oxygen. There are other forms I have heard rumor of but very very little information about such as a grey, vitreous allotrope. These too will all be chased after and hunted down. And whats more, I'm going to enjoy doing it a lot, since there is a LOT of material to read, a lot of engineering work, many allotropes of phosphorus to prepare (I have red phosphorus to start with, and I already have a little white phosphorus, probably the easiest of them all, that I started the phosphorus allotrope hunt with, not much as yet, and not sure of the crystal structure. I might well have to learn X-ray diffraction techniques and build myself, or buy (I'd rather build one than buy one) an x-ray tube and some lead blocks to shield all but the aperture for taking the photographic measurements.
I might prepare some more white phosphorus tonight, if I get bored, or can't sleep, and seal it within the confines of a borosilicate glass ampoule, since I have an amp I made recently for something else but which I ended up not needing. So I can use that for preparing and storing a couple of grams of white phosphorus for the display.
