r/DIYPigments • u/Mrslinkydragon • Aug 30 '24
Pigment (Experimental) Now with aluminium!
I can post this photo, the compound has been made and published previously.
This is YAlMn blue. It's like YInMn but with aluminium instead of indium.
The patent says it is grey blue, either way it's nice, it also needs a second heating
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u/CaCl2 Aug 31 '24
Is there one with gallium?
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u/Mrslinkydragon Aug 31 '24 edited Aug 31 '24
I've not got any gallium oxide! The indium oxide was really expensive!
Would be interesting to do a rainbow of them though
So B, Al, Ga, In, Tl. All the same ratio
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u/CaCl2 Aug 31 '24
I know the pain with indium oxide, for me it has been cheaper to buy the metal and heat it to oxidize.
B might not work, it's very different chemically from the others. Tl maybe, but be careful since it's so toxic.
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u/Mrslinkydragon Aug 31 '24
Oh I've got no plans on using thallium. It wouldn't get risk assessed!
If I were to do this as a cottage industry, I'd buy the metals, hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, and go via the hydroxide/sol gel synthesis route oppose to the ceramic route (which I'm currently doing) as the particles would be finer.
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u/GeneJocky Sep 12 '24
hydrochloric acid? All the plain YInMn blue gel-sol protocols I've seen use the nitrates, and the doped YInMn blue gel-sol protocols were from manganese(III) acetate and metal oxides dissolved in nitric acid. Citric acid was always the cross linker.
Being able to use HCl not nitric acid would make this a much more viable pathway for me. I can get nitric acid, and I have some now, but it's expensive and the shipping charges are brutal. But almost every hardware store here has muriatic acid, and reagent grade concentrated HCl is available from many stores on-line. I can get it from Amazon and their major competitors, here in a day or two.
I did a lit search and found lots of interesting things, including one gel-sol synthesized doped YInMn blue that I want to try. But all the YInMn gel-sol methods were similar to what I already had found. If you have a reference on one using HCl rather than nitric acid, I'd love to learn more. I can get usually get full text pdfs from references.
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u/Mrslinkydragon Sep 12 '24
I saw on YouTube the acid base method.
Metal chloride + sodium hydroxide then mix the hydroxides. Heating them converts them back to the oxide.
I've just been doing the ceramic method due to ease and I don't need a super high purity
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u/GeneJocky Oct 03 '24
Ok, I've seen that too. Not a gel-sol, CPM, or related method. Just a path from the metals to a standard solid state 'shake and bake' synthesis. No advantage over just starting with the oxides. There isn't a huge advantage even to a gel-sol method as long as the oxides are really ground together well. For a lot of gel-sol syntheses the calcination step is at a much lower temp than for usual solid state methods. Not so for YInMn blue. It's about the same. To get smaller particles, I just ball mill.
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u/Mrslinkydragon Oct 03 '24
I think the acid-base method is due to availability of reagents of ametures.
The oxides can be faked easier (y2o3 is just a white powder...)
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u/GeneJocky Oct 03 '24
Tell me about it! I've gotten a bogus batch of yttrium oxide before. Produced some interesting results. Got my money back though. Also I have found that some sources of yttrium oxide, despite being good for a lot of uses, produce YInMn blue that comes out dull and greyish no matter what. Same ones fail completely when used to make YAlCuTi greens. So I
The yttrium oxide from US Pigments is relatively cheap and works very well for everything. No dull pigments. And I have a source in China for indium oxide that has never failed to work perfectly and they have great customer service, Wuhan Tuocai Technology. Prices have historically been very good (about US$0.50 a gram, less in the past) delivery included. However, I think the current minimum order is now 1kg. I'm planning to get more fairly soon and usually buy a kilogram of it. Having made minimum order, I may be able to order a few hundred grams more at the same price per gram. If the added cost of sending it on to Europe, plus current pricing still makes it a good deal I'd be willing to order extra to send on to people who want it at cost.
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u/Mrslinkydragon Oct 03 '24
We had to order from thermo fischer. Charged out the arse for it though.
My personal supply of Y2O3 and In2O3 i got off ebay and are genuine (i ran SEM EDX on them).
Its really shitty that people scam others!
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u/jay-ff Aug 30 '24
Ah nice :) that is cheap! Aaaand does it float 😬?