Sciencemadness Discussion Board

White Phosphorus from urine.

copperastic - 30-3-2014 at 07:31

Hi, has any body tried getting phosphorus from your urine? If so how did you do it?
Thanks.

blogfast25 - 30-3-2014 at 08:40

Check out the sticky thread near the top. Extracting P from ANYTHING is seriously difficult.

copperastic - 30-3-2014 at 08:42

What sticky thread?

elementcollector1 - 30-3-2014 at 08:50

There are threads at the top of the 'Chemistry in General' page with "Sticky ->" noted on the left-hand side. One of these is the phosphorus thread. These stickies are also present at the tops of other subsections, as they are usually important and/or commonly brought-up topics.

elementcollector1 - 30-3-2014 at 08:50

There are threads at the top of the 'Chemistry in General' page with "Sticky ->" noted on the left-hand side. One of these is the phosphorus thread. These stickies are also present at the tops of other subsections, as they are usually important and/or commonly brought-up topics.

Zyklon-A - 30-3-2014 at 09:08

I tried it long ago, it didn't work. Getting phosphorous is very hard, there are no easy methods, that I've seen.
It takes gallons of concentrated piss to get even a few grams, not worth the smell, or the time, not even worth the piss.:D

copperastic - 30-3-2014 at 09:09

Zyklonb could i get any useful chemicals?

Zyklon-A - 30-3-2014 at 09:12

Please elaborate.

copperastic - 30-3-2014 at 09:17

Could I get any chemicals that would be useful in reactions. Like urea.

Zyklon-A - 30-3-2014 at 09:21

From urine? Yes, it's possible.
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=24614
NASA did some work with it too:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1971002...

[Edited on 30-3-2014 by Zyklonb]

copperastic - 30-3-2014 at 09:23

Could you get Uric acid from it?

Zyklon-A - 30-3-2014 at 09:25

Read the first link, uric acid is mentioned, not sure if it can be successfully isolated though.

copperastic - 30-3-2014 at 09:25

Never mind there is barely any in urine.

ScienceSquirrel - 30-3-2014 at 14:03

The easiest thing to separate from urine is urea.
I believe there is around 30g in the daily urine production of an adult human.
It might be an idea to eat a protein rich diet for a week or so to maximise production.
Collect and concentrate the urine for a week or so. I think the best idea would be a large covered bucket in a old fridge.
Urine is quite sterile so if you keep it cool and free from bacterial contamination it should not break down and smell of ammonia. You could add an antibacterial stabiliser like Stayclean to be on the safe side.
Urea is pretty stable so I guess that you could boil the urine down using a gas ring and a suitable pot.
Cool the concentated solution and add nitric acid. Urea nitrate is very insoluble and will crash out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea#Historical_process
I think that some the sex hormones were isolated from urine but it must have been a very smelly job as huge amounts of urine were concentrated, salts and urea were crystallised out and the concentrate was concentrated further. Eventually the hormones were isolated and characterised.
I worked in a lab where someone was working on metabolites of arylacetic acids. She used to receive drums of urine that she used to concentrate then extract. Analysis was done on HPLC.
It was a big lab with lots of vacant benches and she was at the other end to me.
She was a meticulous worker but a faint restroom smell hung about her bench!
Addendum: phosphorous was first extracted from microcosmic salt by Brandt.
Microcosmic salt is left in the residue after extracting urea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmic_salt


[Edited on 30-3-2014 by ScienceSquirrel]

Bert - 2-4-2014 at 15:00

Quote: Originally posted by Zyklonb  
I tried it long ago, it didn't work. Getting phosphorous is very hard, there are no easy methods, that I've seen.
It takes gallons of concentrated piss to get even a few grams, not worth the smell, or the time, not even worth the piss.:D



If you want phosphorous, get bone meal fertilizer from the garden store. Calcine it until it's like charcoal with all the fat, protein & non minerals reduced to ash. It's a much better source.

Seriously, people are still trying this, just because the first isolation was from urine...

Zyklon-A - 2-4-2014 at 15:50

ScienceSquirrel , is the urea nitrate produced in the method above pure? Or will any other nitrates precipitate? I guess it depends on what you eat....

GoldGuy - 2-4-2014 at 16:39

Bert

Do you have any further information on how to do this? Isolation technique? patents? papers?

Thank you!

Zyklon-A - 2-4-2014 at 17:18

How about reading the Preparation of elemental phosphorus thread?

Bert - 2-4-2014 at 17:34

This is the historical process from the 17th century- Pretty much the alchemist Hennig Brand's technique. Later updated to use bone ash instead of biological waste, still later to use mineral phosphate or synthetic phosphate salts

Phosphorus containing material such as dried urine (Sodium phosphate) or bone ash (Calcium & Magnesium phosphates), sand (Silicon dioxide) and charcoal (Carbon) go into a high temperature retort placed inside a furnace, with the beak led under the surface of a water trough.

Reaction produces Carbon monoxide, a fused silicate and elemental phosphorus. Stoichiometry varies with the phosphate used-

I'll let you do some reading for the historical background and a ballanced chemical equation: Here is a historical overlook

This is a good read- Well worth the price on Amazon. The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus, byJohn Emsley

Dan Vizine - 6-4-2014 at 08:19

This question is a good example of the "can I?" vs. the "should I?" of at-home science experiments.

For the specific case of P from urine, you can start with chemicals that are both very cheap and readily available on eBay. It's the same basic rxn, P from a phosphate and you circumvent boiling down a ton of urine. So, can I (get it from urine)? Perhaps. Should I? Clearly no.

And, if you say you don't have the extra money to buy the off-the-shelf precursors, you probably don't have the means to perform the reaction, although ingenuity can overcome a lot of obstacles and it's not impossible to do this on the cheap.

But back to the urine approach...Try to balance the costs in physical resources with the results. The actual intellectual learning process has value, but the ratio of time spent learning chemistry to the time spent doing drone work isn't very high in this kind of project.

This isn't criticism of your concept, just reflections on a lifetime of time spent performing science at home and what I would have done differently to best use my time.

[Edited on 6-4-2014 by Dan Vizine]

blogfast25 - 6-4-2014 at 09:32

Hennig Brand thought he would be making gold. A bizarre belief system attributing divinity to gold, humans and the slightly 'golden' colour of urine led him to believe this, or so I've read. He must have had the shock of his life when something extremely flammable and phosphorescent showed up instead. Not many of us get that kind of surprise in our labs...

zed - 7-4-2014 at 16:53

Lots of valuable stuff in urine. Some folks claim it to be a good source of antigen-antibody complexes. Junkie urine is loaded with opioids. Back when the miracle drug Pennicillin was first used, it was in short supply. Since it was the only hope for folks with runaway infections, it was sometimes recovered from urine, and recycled.

jsc - 12-5-2014 at 12:24

I have been collecting my piss for years with no success so far.

Rogeryermaw - 12-5-2014 at 13:42

i tried the urine method years ago. such a waste of time, effort, resources...ect. if you do the reading you will find that brandt collected several dozens of gallons and at the end of it all, he only collected just over a hundred grams of phosphorus. (NaPO3)6 is super cheap, readily available and, with the right reducing agents, reacts at a MUCH lower temp, putting the reaction well within the home experimenters' reach. this is all well documented in excruciating detail by more than just a couple of us up there in the sticky.

Fenir - 12-5-2014 at 19:51

Apparently this process smells aweful. I would hate to be the neighbor of someone distilling hundeds of gallons of stale urine.

Fenir - 21-5-2014 at 05:31

Apparently this process smells aweful. I would hate to be the neighbor of someone distilling hundeds of gallons of stale urine.