A free lunch is always good, even if there isn't meant to be any such thing.
Me...I..err...vented the kitchen out, and scraped off some parts of a spray of burn marks now firmly part of one of the kitchen cabinets after a long-necked ampoule broke open under heat-sealing, and resulted in a jet of molten white phosphorus. Left the windows open and the extractor fan on for the night to clear out the smoke. Was only a few grams of willy pete, but damn, the stuff doesn't half make one hell of a lot of acidic smoke (P2O5, phosphorus pentoxide, is the smoke, actually a dimer, P4O10, its the anhydride of (ortho)phosphoric acid, H3PO4 and about the most extremely powerful dessicant available, the strongest I know of anyway, available or otherwise, bar things that don't hydrate, but chemically react to form a second compound, preferably gaseous, which escapes, taking the water with it after chemically abstracting same, such as for example, using calcium carbide, CaC2, to produce acetylene gas for final end-stage drying of alcohols, distillation over calcium carbide is one of the best ways, after pretreating with other drying agents, to rid an alcohol of every last single tiny trace of H2O)
That phosphorus mishap was messy, to say the least, but no harm done. I'm more displeased about the loss of the amp, as I had to butcher a pipette to make it, and of the elemental phosphorus itself. Since for most hobbyist chemists its extremely hard to come by, it kinda feels wasteful, even though I haven't any problem getting it, and I used a mere few thousandths of what I have. Its just the principle of it really, and I'd rather have been able to salvage it at least.
No harm done to me, coat took any fine particulates of burning WP coming my way below head height, and my face shield kept it from hitting me in the face. Only marks on me were some singed sections of hair that got frazzled to a crisp, because whilst the protective shield is a full face, top of head and right down to just below shoulder blades model and even blast-rated my hair is longer than the shield is. Or at least, as of now, most of it is
Decided to go switch from preparing a better sample of WP, temporarily, until I can get some better, thicker amps, to another project. Going back to my boron experiments. Currently I'm evaporating the results of a mixture of borax (sodium borate) mixed with concentrated hydrochloric acid to give boric acid and table salt. That has had the excess HCl acid brought to neutral PH with saturated sodium carbonate solution and the resulting solution and pasty white foamy slurry is having the water evaporated off first, or most of it, and finally, I'll roast it to give me boron trioxide, B2O3, either before or after this stage removing the sodium chloride, perhaps by treatment with sulfuric acid to give sodium sulfate and boric acid, driving off HCl gas, because sodium sulfate is less soluble, and can be treated with a calcium salt, to perform a salt metathesis reaction giving calcium sulfate, gypsum, or plaster of paris when roasted, which is insoluble, careful leaching with dilute acid should then give me boric acid and the calcium sulfate, form either a solution of boric acid, or form an ester of it, like triethyl borate, which will be volatile and distillable, but decompose to boron oxides or boric acid, I forget which on burning it, thus purifying it for the last stage prior to liberating the elemental boron.
Namely, mixing it with magnesium powder, in the correct molar ratio to reduce whatever is the quantity of boron trioxide I'll eventually end up with, purified and freed of the salt, in a mold, with a hole in the bottom such as a tin can, something disposable, with a hole punched through the bottom, just a small one to provide a weakest point for the intense heat produced during the metallothermic reduction by magnesium to give boron in the elemental state, along with some magnesium oxide, and probably some magnesium boride, although I hope to minimize the latter due to the fact that I intend on removing the magnesium traces by treatment with dilute hydrochloric acid. With magnesium boride, this will produce the extremely poisonous, and upon contact with air or water, pyrophoric diborane and possibly pentaborane, both of which are toxic as hell. But the exit gases will be decomposed by leading them out directly onto a red-hot surface made from a piece of aluminium metal, which will pyrolyze the di/penta/decaborane gases and form a film of very pure elemental boron indeed, and dissolve away the aluminium using dilute sodium or potassium hydroxide perhaps. The decomposition of diborane and other boranes is IIRC a process used in the semiconductor industry to produce epitaxial films of boron, and to refine boron to extreme degrees of purity. I might play about with growing such films on foils of other metals that can be similarly decomposed, or even of graphene, graphene oxide, quartz, glass, or ultra-thin layers of graphite which might give some interesting electrical properties to play about with. Especially in the case of the 1-dimensional compound graphene.
First, time to check on the evaporation of water from my boric acid. At the very poorest, I can expect to produce some elemental boron, additional effort would of course, and safety precautions, need to go into refining it to semiconductor-grade for use in growing ultra-thin epitaxial layers.
