I have become very interested in Rochelle Salt Crystals of late, and no, surprisingly enough, not because of its laxative properties. So this is my second go at making some crystals. The first batch was okay, however, as I read further I realized you can’t get away with using tap water but need to use distilled water. This batch looks much better, though the crystals are still rather small, for a third batch I will try and use one or two of the good crystals as a seed crystal and see if I can get some larger crystals. In the first half of the video I go over the background of the role Rochelle salts have played in the discovery of pyroelectricity, piezoelectricty, and ferroelectricity and in the second part of the video I show how to grow the crystals. To give the cliff notes, I was able to demonstrate piezoelectricity but it was pretty meh. There is obviously something I am missing there. If I really had to guess, one probably wants a much, much thinner layer of Rochelle salt as a) the voltage comes from the two sides of the crystal and the crystal itself is a dielectric, i.e. insulator. The ferroelectricity was pretty interesting to me, there is a residual voltage in the crystal after it sees a high voltage. It reminds me of “capacitor rebound” where one sees something similar with capacitors, however, it does seem to stick around longer, I am not certain how long it sticks around for. There is an easy way to make the crystals and a hard way, I am using the easy way. It is really simple and straight forward and if I had success, pretty much anyone could have success or do better as well. So in a nutshell, I was able to see both piezoelectricity and ferroelectricity, the crystals are easy and fun to make so someone else may come along and show me how to have even more dramatic examples of both piezo and ferro electricity.
Thanks,
Paul
Greetings and welcome to another Insight project video Welcome welcome so I thought in this video I would demonstrate how to grow Rochelle salt crystals and um you might be thinking you know I that’s crazy man why would you do something like that so I thought I’ll spend the first five 10 minutes
Just talking a little bit about relle salt and then um the last five 10 minutes will demonstrate how you grow it and then uh spend a minute and see what what we actually have at the end so I guess we could start at Wikipedia it’s not the worst place but um it gets
A lot more interesting once you dig just a little bit deeper um but here they’re noticing it was first prepared by an apothecary um and that it is piso electric so this is why this is really why I’m interested in it relle salt is piso electric which
Means when you press on it mechanical force there’s an electricity there there’s a a voltage difference that that appears and it’s um really the granddaddy of piso electricity that’s this is where it was discovered and it’s also pyroelectric meaning that it has a different voltage depending on the temperature and finally
It’s ferroelectric which is the strangest one of all which is when it’s subjected to a particular um voltage potential it doesn’t go back to its original um voltage it just sits there at a new voltage after that and that’s um that’s the one that I also want to look
At as this goes along and finally um it has been used medicinally as a laxative and I mean you know it was a hit as a laxative in France we’ll get into that in a minute um there’s a couple good writeups on it so I mean it’s it’s like
A it’s not a triple threat it’s a quadruple threat it’s ferroelectric it’s laxative it’s piso electric it’s pyroelectric it’s what more could you what more could you ask from a single simple Crystal um this is another reason why I wanted to make it is most of the stuff
On the internet they go through like how they were getting it from you know The Vineyards in France you know you start with tartar and the minimum acid content and then sodium hydroxide the PHA activated charcoal chemically purified blah blah blah what does this even mean the filter is evaporated 42
Be um and so on and so forth and I admit there is a lot of good work on the internet with a lot of videos and a lot of writeups of people going just from the starting materials and getting um you know doing all of the work and ending up with relle Saul
Um you know how however I’m I’m a simple guy and it’s it’s sort of like well why don’t you just buy the Rell salt and that’s what you can do it saves you a lot of work so here I mean I just bought this it was like the first result on Amazon
It’s like seven bucks a bottle it comes as two bottles so that saves you from going through what they were starting to talk about there on um on the Wikipedia right up so if you want to go from the you know the tartar to baking soda baking
Powder and you know worrying about the ph and the activated charcoal and all that more power to you and I think that’s wonderful and again um there are some good videos and writeups in that but if you just buy this stuff you just heat the water pour it in the in the
Water till it it you can’t put any more in and then leave it out on the window sill so it’s sort of like this is easier than people are making it out to be although I will say as I delved into it there’s a whole art there’s like multiple patents of actually growing
Great crystals that um that are consistent things like that so let’s let’s get away from Wikipedia now and kind of dive in there are two writeups that I want to spend hopefully just like 2 minutes on each so here’s the first right up relle saw by Michael gaspi who has an interesting
Website and I as I delved into this I noticed a lot of people are interested in Rell Sal it’s not just me and Michael talks a lot about um the history I really enjoy writeups like this the history and also a great deal on how to grow the
Crystals um so he’s just saying you know he made a you know he might have plagiarized stuff you know whatever uh that got probably plagiarized whole chunks of this um but it’s a it’s an interesting um write up that he did so he’s it’s named after the Port City of
La relle France and there were some pharmacists there that um were doing herbal kind of medicines and um they were looking for laxatives um and what they came up with was this byproduct of the wine industry and so you have the the Tartar and then the acid and then the the car
Sodium carbonate as the base and so that gives you a salt when you have an acid in a base um so this gentleman actually dug out like some labels from the time for the the product that it was it was actually a hit at the time as a as a
Pharmaceutical um so that’s another thing about this too is that you know you don’t need like Fume hoods and masks and gloves which is nice it’s you know if it if it doesn’t work you know you can just I mean don’t do this but you could just eat it um and there’s there’s
The dosage but don’t do that and again once you once you start to pull on these threads everything becomes interesting so the curies of um madam Marie cury Fame two two Nobel prizes there uh best known of course for radioactivity but she and her husband
Pier did a lot of work they were the first to identify that rochell salt was also piso electric um 1824 this gentleman noticed that it’s pyroelectric and then they notice that it’s piso electric so that kind of just an interesting aside there that a lot of people have been interested in relle
Salt now I keep reading this and so far I haven’t had success it remains to this day one of the most peo electric substance ever found my first batch kind of stunk it was a little bit better than wood but as I read on this you can’t get
Away with not a person doesn’t look very happy uh you can’t get away with not um using distilled wood water so it’s U something where you really need to use distilled water and here is the the Web Master just uh at a museum in France and now it becomes interesting
Because it developed a war application and where it became Central to development of sonar technology for hunting submarines and so when something’s piso electric it will generate an electric current in response to a deformation and similarly if a current is applied it deforms so you can use it
To send out a ping and then um try to have it register the reflected paint so I thought that was kind of cool like when you here hear in movies those pings it’s either like uh the quartz approach or the relle salt approach with sonar and so here he’s just talking
About it you know is used with uh microphones and speakers um also used with photograph U needles if I recall I don’t think it’s in this right up um now here are what good crystals look like mine haven’t looked that good but that’s when you really put the time into growing them
Correctly and there are you know whole books uh classic text crystals and crystal growing and um so there are patents in the area and things like that there’s a like a whole art to it but I just want to see can I can I grow some uh I don’t know if I’ll
Get something you know anywhere near that good but can I just just grow something that’s piso electric uh is there anything else in here I want to talk about that’s just the Rochelle salt saturation curve so as I said you just heat the water and a lot of it can
Saturate in hot water and then you let the water cool it comes out of the saturation and and crystallizes and he spends a lot of time you know like how you make it from scratch with the baking soda distilled water yeah yeah I really should have done this
The first time um you don’t you can’t use tap water um and cream of tartter but you got to get the right one because if it’s not pure enough it’s not going to be good and then you know here are the steps for the first part so it’s like
You know again I’m I’m okay with just buying the r shell Soul it’s not like it’s 100 bucks and um then a little bit there’s uh again just you know articles and books and patents on how to do it correctly and things like that so that’s
That article the one that I found even more interesting though was this one um just another kind of uh write up I just I love these kinds of writeups uh Short history of Ferro electricity it all began with assault in LA relle and again here we see David
Brewster who saw that it was pyroelectric and the curies who saw that it was um piso electric yeah here’s where I saw Edison um used it in the photograph um and again during World War I is where it became uh very important as a submarine detector and um I believe that was
Someone who worked on that um so as he starts to get into um fero electricity he notes this um professor in Zurich who hypothesized that some molecules carry a a permanent electric dipole moment an analogy to the Magnetic Moment of paramagnetic substances so that’s where it starts to
Get even more interesting and you know he says there’s probably like a cury temperature like a ferromagnet and um then we we got to bring in Edwin Schrodinger you know no no small luminary there and Schrodinger was the one who first uh said that you know that you could have
Something uh ferroelectric and he coined that term in 1912 and this is another um I’ve looked at this person’s paper and this is something I want to read more on was um Joseph v vasic um out of Ohio and he did a lot of work in this um and he was
Studying under uh Professor um who was known for working cosmic rays Cosmic gray physics so vasic started a a rigorous study of the analogy between magnetic properties fa magnetics and the dialectric properties of relle salt and what he saw and concluded was that the behavior the displacement electric intensity and polarization are
Analogous to BH and I in the case of magnetism the data is due to a hysteresis in P analogous to Magnetic hysteresis this would suggest a parallelism between the behavior of Rochelle salt as dialectric and steel for example as a ferromagnetic substance um bearing out this idea the hysteresis
Curves obtained for relle salt analogous are analogous to the VH curves of magnetism so that’s a a bit complicated but the take-home there as I read it is just as like if you have a screwdriver you know you take a magnet and you put it at the end of the screwdriver you
Know you leave it there for a while or rub it on there for a while and then afterwards that screwdriver will pick up iron screws which is kind of nice you know it’s nice thing to do to your screwdrivers so unless you’re screwing in a brass screw then you it’s a lot
Easier to keep the screw in place or pull the screw out if you you know if it’s just sitting there on its side or something so so in the same way that a screwdriver will pick up a magnetic field when exposed to a magnetic field relle salt will pick up an electric
Field when exposed to an electric field that’s that’s how I read what he’s saying here and then they have this graph this is a hysteresis graph that he um from his data let’s just spend a 30 seconds on that so I’ve enlarged it but it’s it’s really hard to read but this
Is your electric field on this axis and this I believe that says kols and I think that says charge so the way I interpret this is you have your relle salt here with no electric field you expose it to an increasing electric field and there’s a charge or voltage
That you see and eventually apparently ASM totically approaches a limit there and then you decrease the field and and you know this is what a hysteresis curve is it doesn’t follow that that line it follows this line so now you go back to zero and you’re sitting at a different
Voltage than you started isn’t that odd so just as you know the screwdriver will hold a magnetic field after being exposed to a magnetic field the Rell salt will hold an electric field after being exposed to an electric field then the paper goes on to say perhaps
The most history making graph is that of the temperature dependence of the piso electric response um for relle salt so I’ve enlarged this graph and deflection I don’t know what that is cm centimeters maybe I don’t know I I take it as that’s how good the piso electricity is and what I found
Really interesting here because the x-axis is is um I would say degrees Centigrade that there’s room temperature right around 20 cels and so it looks like looks like you want to be around freezing for the most poso electricity so I don’t know that’s another thing I’m going to have to look
At but that’s where it looks like it’s most piso electric then from here um he just goes on that you know so now scientists said well if this thing’s piso electric what else is piso electric and so there was a lot of work by a lot of scientists looking for other piso electric
Materials um K3 P4 I don’t know why I found this funny kh2 P4 my gosh I guess that’s sort of an inside joke um I guess that’s a famous one or something either that or is a typo um so there are now known to to be a lot of
Ferroelectric materials um you know I think uh yeah barium titanate is um one a prosite ferroelectric and prosites are a big area of research especially in relation to um kind of um using their properties to try to improve solar cells um so there are now there are known to
Be a lot of um Ferro electrics but um Rell salt is still a very good one and so it’s really had a big impact it’s um been used with uh certain types of um capacitors uh phonograph pickups accelerometers ultrasound generators sonar devices Etc so the paper has some also good
Discussion on you know why is this there and you know is it related to hydrogen bonding um but they found it also now materials without hydrogen bonds and um so on and so forth so there’s some good theoretical discussion but I think that’s that’s really enough for you to
Get an idea of you know why I’m interested so let’s wrap up this part and now we’ll see whether it works that I’ll be able to show you how you too can grow your own pyroelectric pel electric ferroelectric roel rochell salt crystals so that that’s um what we’re going to do
Now so here apologize about the noise I fired up the the water distiller and when this this thing gets heated up there’ll be distilled water that will come out it’ll drop into here and we don’t need that much of it here are some crystals that I grew last time with tap
Water and you see they’re nice but they’re they’re not like beautiful they don’t look like diamonds or anything that’s for sure but they are nice and they are piso electric um so that’s sort of what you want to do here’s this is what I ordered you know relle Sal
Why why spend it was I I got two of these for like seven bucks or something like that maybe I’m wrong but it was it was inexpensive I I think that’s within the ballpark the one thing you want to be well let me just tell you how how to
Do it first and then tell you what to be careful about um Rochelle salt is the solubility in water is greatly dependent on temperature so what you do is you bring water to a boil you put in Rochelle salt until it’s it’s fully saturated no more dissolves and then you
Let it cool on the window sill and that’s it that’s all you have to do to make it they make it so complicated on the internet the the one thing to be careful about is that um this stuff I actually um this came as like two
Bottles of this and I went through one and you know one and a third of them before I actually got um you know a little uh Pan about you know um you know a little a little uh soup kind of thing fully saturated so in other
Words uh when I looked it up something like two or three or four times the weight of the Rochelle salt will go into solution before it’s fully saturated so you don’t want to boil a lot of water or otherwise you’re never going to get um the thing fully sat
Saturated you just need a little bit of water and that’s all there is to it so I’m going to I’m going to let this go and then I’ll I’ll do the next part not to make it you know too big a deal of it but there’s there’s just the
Distilled water coming out of the still and um I’m going to let this fill up we’re not going to need the full of it we probably won’t need half a glass we’ll figure that out after I have the distilled water okay so we got more than enough
Water here okay so here we have our distilled water Rell salt what I want to do is just put the distilled water this is where we’ll grow the crystals into here and the reason I’m doing that is because the one thing that really surprised me the first time is just how
Soluble this stuff is once you get the water boiling so I think that’s enough water right there okay so I only used about half of that and since there’s so little water that’ll that’ll get boiling really quickly and then you just start putting this in until no more dissolves and then
Once you have it fully saturated at Boiling then um you go until there’s a little bit of excess and then we’ll just run it through a coffee filter to get rid of any undissolved powder so I have this at a slow boil now and I’ll start adding M shell Salt oh thank heavens that could have been a disaster but you can see it dissolves very well add more so you can see what I mean about how soluble this is G through it was up to like there we’ve gone through half of it we’re still not saturated I hope I have
Enough I got about one more of those to do starting to look right going be saturated so tag I used all of this all of that this little bit of water you can kind of see if I if I can find it there’s a few specs that look like they didn’t go into
Solution so I think it’s really close to being fully saturated I’m just kind of winging it here but I think um the water will come off before the relle salt so I’m just going to let it boil for like 2 3 minutes and then uh
And then go from there okay so after let letting it boil for a minute now you can see there’s something that’s not going into solution and so now we just run this through a coffee filter coffee filter I got to do this slowly so I don’t screw this up give that a
Minute see you can see all the stuff that didn’t go into solution good so far so good give me a minute to let that drain so while we’re letting that drain I also say there was an interesting research article I found and I’ll try
And dig it out for this video if I can find it again but what people were doing um they said was you know like you can have your super saturated solution there and they had one paper where they stuck a piece of wood in and you know wait the
Wood down and so when it crystallizes it’ll crystallize also within the wood and then the second part that they the second paper they did which I thought was really interesting was they took pla the um what is it poly something acid that is the most uh common I think 3D
Printing material at least that’s what I use and you know when you print something it’s generally U you know like half air there’s a lot of space in it it’s not just full pla so they would put pla material in with super saturated solution let the thing crystallize and
Then you have the crystals within the pla solution and that could be really neat in terms of um I mean that’s definitely something that I want to try to replicate for this one I’m just going to try to do distilled see whether it works with distilled water and whether
It’s more um pis Andor ferroelectric but if I can I’ll dig out the article oh promises so here we have our super saturated solution pour it in here that essentially is it the only thing I’m going to do I’m going to move this over to the
Um counter the uh window sill here and um one of the nice things is that it’s becoming chilly now and so um because of the colder the thing gets the um less of it will go into solution and and so they’re saying if you don’t have
Success you know try put it it in the refrigerator so this should hopefully um help it along a little bit since it’s um becoming chilly heading towards winter so I hope I have success with this we’ll check back in on it and probably take about 2 3 days for the crystals to fully
Form but you can start to see them forming after a day or so so here we are one day later I’m not sure if it’s showing up that well on the camera but up around um top and to the left there we can see the crystals starting to form
So it’ll probably take another couple days be before this is fully formed okay so this has been sitting here for I don’t know like 3 or 4 days now it was pretty much down after a day or two but I wanted everything to to fully set so I
I I’ve kind of put like a magician’s handkerchief on this just to make it dramatic for the grand Duma so and there we have it I don’t know if it shows up that well on the camera there are your Rosell salt crystals so here we can sort of do a
Side by side comparison this was the stuff that I grew with um tap water which you can’t get away with and these are the crystals that I grew with distilled water they look similar but these are obviously a bit more translucent the other issue is there’s an occasional good Crystal there’s one
That’s what you want and then I don’t know how well it will show up on the camera but what you end up seeing when you look at this is that there are other crystals like that but they’re just like layered one on top of of another so
There’s you know like 70 crystals like this just all mushed together and what you would like would be you know one just a few large crystals so now I get that what they say you’re supposed to do is um take a crystal like this use it as a seed
Crystal maybe a couple others that are very good and then repeat the process and then you have larger um you know much more consistent crystals so that’s um that’s something that I’ll look to do going forward but let’s just see what we got here and see if we can see any piso
Electricity and any Ferro El electricity they are kind of cool they look nice okay so let’s see what we got so I’ve got I think that one’s a pretty much a single Crystal it was another good one I found that I kind of dug out of that
Mess and I put it between just two plates of copper and then you know I don’t know I mean maybe you don’t even need them all single crystals I mean one of the things I’d like to do is just take all of the stuff put it in a blender till you have a
Powder and then use the powder and that might be the way to go because otherwise unless the crystals like perfect um you don’t have good surface contact there I don’t know if that’s important or not so I just put a meter on it and it’s just sitting there you know like
2.5 well it’s going down now 2.3 molts what I’m going to do is I’m going to hit it with um with this thing let’s see see what happens hey there it is there it is now I admit it’s a little bit underwhelming I mean I will say that
That’s piso electricity you know i’ I’ve done it I was kind of like hoping for for like 5 volts or something and it’s 5 molts so that’s not so good um I could put a cap across it just to smooth things out and because maybe it’s
Going up to to like 20 it probably is but you just can’t see it I mean literally it’s probably going a little bit higher than that but it’s just so little current it just drains out immediately but I won’t lie to you that’s a bit disappointing and I also won’t lie you I
Don’t really know what I’m doing um here’s here’s like a commercial p Electric thing I just there was like 10 of these from I don’t know like Harbor Freight for like a penny or something like that but let’s see what it does so what you see here is the same
Idea you’ve got it I guess maybe like brass or c coer there and then they just put the dialectric material the the pis electric and it’s like almost sprayed on there instead of this big Crystal um and then they um solded an electrode just right to the dialectric so there’s one plate there
And let’s see what this does well that’s a little bit better that’s like a volt I have no idea why mine sucks so this thing’s getting half a volt and this thing stinks I mean it won’t stay at half a volt I mean that’s like but you kind almost see it there
Went up to half a volt uh for a moment and this thing stinks so it might be see how that is just sprayed on there and then um and then soldered on and here you have this big chunk of Crystal so that might not be what you want
Here I think this is good material I don’t know what material that is it could be relle salt could be like barium titanate or or one of the others so let’s do one last thing let’s blast it with 5,000 volts and see if we can see any um Ferro
Electricity so here we got that at 5,000 volts it’ll dip down to like 3,000 one and get it sparking so what I’m trying to do is see if there’s going to be that hysteresis C and you get a um a difference in voltage after it’s been exposed to a high
Voltage difficulty where I want there now what the heck I mean I have no idea what the material is but this one’s kind of cool it this SP kind of wants to spread out over all of the dialectric I seem to be blasting some of the dialectric
Off well this is actually kind of cool so now I’ve got the meter hooked up again we zap this thing it’s going across the voltmeter and a little cap and it’s sitting at about a third of a volt just sitting there so that’s the hysteresis curve that vasic was talking
About and that he that he showed now I’m going to discharge it comes right back and just charge it again let’s put in a big cap this is I think one UF let’s put in 1,000 UF I’m just curious what the current flow is so here’s a th000 UF cap across there
And it’s it’s having trouble making it back to I think it was 35 or or right around there 34 but let’s short it and springs back pretty quick I think if you gave it time it would it would eventually get close to to back to to
0.35 so that’s kind of cool I mean you just zap the thing once and then you’re sitting at a cool third of a volt that I mean I would say that’s a crystal battery there’s no dissimilar material there’s no water um it’s just you hit it with some
Voltage and it’s like you see with cap rebound except for this isn’t Tech well it is a capacitor so it’s a lot like cap rebound it’s just a question of how long does it persist with this with this um material in the historyus curve of the rochell salt but it seems
To to seems to want to keep coming back keep heading back towards right towards a third of a volt or at least 3/10 I will say it didn’t work with this one and I don’t think this is Rochelle salt so I don’t think this material while this material is p Electric
Whatever it is is not apparently ferroelectric so I guess you know I mean you can kind of you can kind of dream here but this actually isn’t that far off of a dream is um you know if I pick up a a um vandag graph generator I have a little battery
Powered whims Hurst and that I mean that might get me to 10 20,000 volts which be to repeat this but youd probably want a vandag graph generator and we were hitting this I mean it was at 5,000 this Sparks were maybe 3,000 4,000 volts and we’re sitting AT3 volts
Now it’s not linear or is it because if it’s linear and you go up to 300,000 volts then you’d be sitting at 30 volts if you went up to 3 million you’d be sitting at 300 volts um I’m not again I I don’t know if it’s linear but I’m saying there’s there’s
Orders of magnitude that you can go up on the on the voltage and with something like a vandag graph you could get to 300,000 or 3 million or something like that without a great deal of difficulty so you know it was good news bad news situation bad news I I don’t yet have
The um pizo electric part at all figured out um but you can see it that’s all I can say is you can see it um it’s about as much as I was seeing with wood but the um fero electricity is a little bit better see we’re climbing right back up
There let’s oh now it’s going down a bit let’s hit it again and it’s coming right back so again I don’t know if that lasts for an hour or for a day or for indefinitely like an electrc where it lasts inde definitely oh that’s the very last thing and then I’ll then I’ll
Shut up because this has been a long video is the other thing to do is when you let the crystal sit and this is how they make an electri but it’s not it’s not with this material it’s it’s basically like beeswax um but the same idea that you
Use with an electrc is put the 5,000 volts into the um the rochell salt while it’s in super saturated solution and then ideally when the crystals come out they think that that’s the normal environment and then um you turn the that off and then you might have crystals that sit at
Uh uh you know with a very very strong um uh voltage that just sit there and definitely because they were formed at that 5,000 uh volt potential okay I’ll shut up now but thanks for uh watching and if if you are having fun and uh you know maybe again I
I have no idea what I’m doing but if you’re learning a bit then um please feel free to like subscribe and comment and U until next time stay healthy everyone bye-bye
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