ldanielrosa
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Fun uses for lithium carbonate or hydroxide?
I was at the pottery supply yesterday and I thought "Maybe I should pick up some LiCO3 and convert it to hydroxide". Now I have it and did the
research, and I see that the solubility is annoyingly low. I have no idea what I'll use it for, and I'm hoping for some inspiration.
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mewrox99
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Dissolve it in an acid to prepare lithium salts. Lithium chloride for example is reasonably soluble in water (83.2g/100mL)
You can purify and electrochemically oxidize your lithium chloride to produce Lithium Chlorate. An oxidizer that will give a red colour and is source
of oxygen
[Edited on 16-10-2010 by mewrox99]
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not_important
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Li2CO3 is one of the better compounds for purification. Add a large excess to cold water, bubble in CO2 until saturated. Filter, then bring the
flttrate to a gentle boil, driving off the CO2. Filter while hot, collecting the Li2CO3 on the filter. The filtrate can be chilled and used for
several more cycles of purification, how many depends on the starting level of impurities.
The Li2CO3 + CO2 forms LiHCO3, which like calcium bicarbonate is more soluble than the carbonate; and similarly decomposes back to CO2 and the
carbonate on heating. Both Li2CO3 and LiHCO3 have higher solubility in cold water than in hot. For really pure Li2CO3 do as above but without adding
CO2, this will separate out any CaCO3 present. Forming the bicarbonate gives larger amounts of product per cycle, and does a decent job of removing
sodium - a common impurity.
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ldanielrosa
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Thanks mewrox99. I'll keep that one in mind as another excuse to buy/make an MMO coated anode. Sodium and potassium chlorates and perchlorates are
purchasable here, but that one may be fun to play with. On that note, I'm looking more for hobbyist data on (per)bromates and (per)iodates.
As for other salts PPN, I had already purchased some LiCO3 (and a lot of other carbonates) as stock towards synthesizing other salts as I find need
for them- I just purchased another 450g because I was in the area, it was cheap, and I thought LiOH would be easy and useful.
My other two favorite hydroxides, Na and K, make good soap among other things. Alas, lithium soap can't clean my hands very well- but it'll grease
bearings just fine.
Thanks for the heads up on purifying it, not_important. I don't have the equipment to do any of that just yet.
As it is, I'd planned to use Ca(OH)2 to make LiOH and precipitate CaCO3. Both of my starting ingredients have poor solubility for my tastes, and I
don't want to boil off that much water (it'll cause my refrigerator to fail- yes really). So I'm looking at more of each than is soluble, but the end
product should dissolve as it is synthesized and the residue will be inert.
It seems painfully slow uncertain for what will be at best a 42 gram yield for this attempt. It's sitting right next to my attempt to burn the
organic acid adulterants out of some "NoSalt" KCl with manganese dioxide.
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blogfast25
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What's your goal in making LiOH? Li2CO3 is a good precursor for any Li salt.
It should be possible to obtain LiOH without using enormous amounts of water simply by simmering a stoichiometric slurry of Ca(OH)2 and Li2CO3. The
displacement reaction will be driven by the fact that CaCO3 is extremely water insoluble (in the absence of CO2), much more than Li2CO3. Just make
sure you've got enough water to keep the formed LiOH in solution (sol. acc. Wiki about 13 g LiOH / 100 g water @ 20 C). You should actually see the
colour of the slurry change from off white to snow white and the consistency should also change...
I've also found that my Li2CO3 pottery grade is really quite expensive for what it is: not very pure at all... Now I'm getting pure Li2CO3
from a Polish supplier at a fraction of the cost.
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