Sciencemadness Discussion Board

metal nuggets from sunflower seeds

acidgas - 7-1-2022 at 01:05

I took 2 pounds of organic sunflower kernals and ground them up into a fine greasy sand like mixture in my blender and "pyrolized" them in a holiday cookie tin with a small hole punched in the top so it wouldn't explode. They were incinerated in a hot wood fire for 4 hours in a metal trash can that I modified with air holes.

What I obtained was about 4 ounces of these strange metalloid rocks that feel like a very sharp / glassy pumice. They scratch glass. They float. They are electrically conductive. 1 hour in 31% hot HCL on my stove top had no effect at all. Several hours in jar of Sulfuric Acid drain opener (the red hot stiff) also did not phase them. They also do not react in 50/50 sodium hydroxide solution either. 1 hour on the stove and they glow red but do not lose strength, Tonight I had them hit with a tig welding arc with a tungsten electrode (no gas) ( 30 amps I think) - current flowed through them for several seconds before they burst into a bright ball of fire, and melted the electrode. The exterior of the nugget thing turned rust orange / red but stayed intact. So at 1200 degrees on the stove they are inert for hours, but under an electric arc they explode/ glow. Possibly this was just the calination of a bunch toxic heavy metal oxides looks like?

Sooo, when pyrolizing the seeds for the first several hours in the trash can, the tin shoots a stream of flaming gas which is brighter and meaner looking than a normal pyrolization session, it made me stand back 30 feet and wonder what was being off gassed.
I do know for a fact, the smoke will make also you sick if you breath it. Really sick.

In an earlier attempt I cooked these seeds down into a greasy red / black tar that seemed to burn like the phosphorus I had seen on youtube videos, so being stupid and greedy I thought I had found some sort of ghetto phosphorus source so I attempted tto pyroloze waaay too many seeds before fallingl asleep on the sofa and waking up with a house full of this horrific seed smoke. The smoke burned my sinus like a chemical weapon and gave a me screaming headache that radiated to my eyeball on one side of my head for 3 days. I slept most of the time at. I kept checking to see if I had a glowing "phossie jaw" but had no luck. My inside left nostril up into my skull,around my eye socket and radiating to my inner ear felt like it had burning epoxy poured into it.. It triggered tooth aches for two weeks.

So I was pretty proud of myself at this point thinking this was a phosphorus injury that I had lived through and could now brag about but then I started researching what was actually in sunflower seeds and I found this paper that came out in OCT 2021 from the University of Suceava in Romania:

https://www.mdpi.com/2223-7747/10/11/2487

In this paper they found that sunflower kernals and cakes ( kernals pressed of the oil) contained massive amounts of Thallium, Cesium and Selenium. Look at these numbers. Insane. So what is in these things? Have I once again stumbled into some top secret level trouble? It doesn't say anything on the FDA or NIST website about these metals? Should I call a nutritional and ask their opinion about the 500 mg of thallium in a KG of Sunflower Seeds? Is cesium good for my hair? How can isolate these reactive metals? Are sunflower seeds often a good source for Cesium? Should I start mining polonium 210 with sunflowers?
How can I buy some seeds from the Chernobyl site?

https://youtu.be/S8DyyLSl9Rw

Oh, looks like I can..
https://www.selinawamucii.com/insights/prices/ukraine/sunflo...

I've got a new set of batches ground up into a finer mix. One was boiled for a half day and then ground some more until ot was a creamy frosting texture and then cooked in HCL for another day until the oil and components separated into different layers. I've taken some of the layers and put into separate jars and hit them with some NAOH. The sunflower glop then turns bright yellow and stinks of ammonia after a few hours.



4.png - 1.3MB Microscope7.png - 826kB Microscope6.png - 774kB acid bath.png - 836kB 3.png - 299kB

Ubya - 7-1-2022 at 02:10

Sounds like you have glassy carbon.
I mean you pyrolyzed the seeds in absence of oxygen, so most of the carbon is still there, this explains the inertness, electrical conductivity, temperature resistance and hardness (glassy carbon has a mohs hardness of 7)


acidgas - 7-1-2022 at 03:39

That is what the most of it looks like, but with a metallic side. I had no there was so much metal in sunflower kernals. According to these Romanian grad students that wrote this paper there is cesium (1.02 g/Kg) in the cakes and kernal they tested. Half a gram of TI too. Definitely interesting that these seeds hold so much metal.

https://www.mdpi.com/2223-7747/10/11/2487

metals.png - 130kB

Herr Haber - 7-1-2022 at 04:43

I dont know the conditions necessary for glassy carbon but that could be graphite aswell couldnt it ?
Pyrolized oil acts as a binder very well I'm told.

But those numbers are surprisingly high !
Time to look how to test for presence of those metals and see how far you can go into separating them ? Could be a fun project.

Ubya - 7-1-2022 at 09:18

Quote: Originally posted by Herr Haber  
I dont know the conditions necessary for glassy carbon but that could be graphite aswell couldnt it ?
Pyrolized oil acts as a binder very well I'm told.

But those numbers are surprisingly high !
Time to look how to test for presence of those metals and see how far you can go into separating them ? Could be a fun project.


to go from carbon to graphite you need over 1000°C for many hours, so i doubt he managed to make graphite over a wood flame.


as per the metallic aspect you can just burn what you got in an oxygen rich environment and look at the ashes, only then you can actually see the metal content

mayko - 7-1-2022 at 10:48

Sounds like an interesting variation on the pyrolytic carbon foam:
https://www.sciencemadness.org/whisper/viewthread.php?tid=70...

Sunflowers have a reputation for being metal accumulators; usually it's in the context of bioremediation but the flip side is that they concentrate ambient poisons in tasty little bundles.

Come to think of it, maybe that's part of what was wrong with Fox Mulder....

Fulmen - 7-1-2022 at 12:09

Vegetabile oils are notorious for charring to a hard, insoluble coke-like mass. I sincerely doubt there is anyting metallic in it.

9CWAI - 7-1-2022 at 14:35

Did anything dissolve in the caustic materials? that is probably where the above are in addition to the smoke.