Sounds like strontium aluminate glow powder (that's where the europium doping would come into play) with a heavy marketing spin. I've got some of that and it's definitely better than the old zinc sulfide glow in the dark stuff most of us grew up with but I'm not sure it ended up being worth buying just to see what the difference was. You can get it for a fair bit cheaper than this site but maybe the novelty of it coming in a box labeled "United Nuclear" is worth it or maybe they do a particularly good job at synthesizing it compared to everyone else.
In a similar vein I also went and got a ton of the most saturated pigments I could find after seeing some videos about it. To be honest most colors were disappointing. Definitely more saturated than even a good HDR TV or monitor but not impressively so. It might have been more fun in the days where having a monitor that properly covered sRGB accurately was uncommon but now we're used to phones with good dp3 or wider gamuts stretching things out because it looks more vivid and the absolute difference between that and the limit of vision is less of a leap. The ultra deep non-reflective blacks are as fun as advertised though. They made for less an "oh, it's a really dark object" experience and more "a piece of my living room is missing and turned into an empty hole" feeling.
Edit: While I'm throwing out chemistry related party trick items I've always been a fan of element cubes and have grown quite the collection now. The most fun of them all is the tungsten block which is dense enough to catch you by surprise. Be careful not to get a "tungsten alloy" one, it eats away at the density. It's also great to just toss around/fidget with... albeit one of the tungsten spheres might be better for your desk and toes.
I have always coveted a chunk of tungsten, but be aware that there's some implication that it's a carcinogen[1] though that's a bit unclear if it's actually other metals it is alloyed with (in which case the purer the cube...)
I suspect handling a tungsten cube delivers very little tungsten into your bloodstream, even if you lick your fingers afterwards. I'd imagine munitions or metalshop grinding/polishing generates many orders of magnitude more microscopic metal dust.
You could always coat it in polyurethane - a clear coat shouldn't diminish the impressiveness of the density.
> "In September of 1994, a French soldier drank wine from a rifle barrel. Fifteen minutes later, he started having seizures. He was rushed to the hospital and treated for 'acute tungsten intoxication'—the first known case in medical history. He reportedly made a full recovery, although concentrations of tungsten were present in all his body tissues for weeks."
Grinding tungsten is also something that is done in TIG welding: it becomes periodically necessary to grind a new point on a tungsten electrode. (How often this is done varies according to how steady a person's hand is.) I think of this story about the French soldier as a good reminder not to lick my workbench next to the grinder.
I would worry about the thorium in thoriated TIG electrodes more than tungstens toxicity.
Thankfully it is in the process of being phased out as an additive, too bad that it is a very good one, if you ignore the radioactivity.
I've never tried (or wanted to try) thoriated tungsten. I've always just used lanthanated, and it seems to do the job. Last I checked, thoriated was cheaper, so maybe that's a draw for some people. I don't know if thoriated is better in any situations; I was under the impression than lanthanated works just as well.
If you want that kind of effect, LEDs or lasers are your best bet. The colors are intensely saturated, and absurdly bright (different color-specific star LEDs on PCBs, mounted on aluminum heatsink, run near the current limit for the LED).
LEDs have a very poor spectral range, and mixing 3 distinct colors (RBG) is not the same as real full spectrum color. It's a good approximation which is why we use it, but an approximation none then less.
Spectral range in LEDs in the past decade has become amazing. For the visible spectrum you can cover the entire area with a reasonable intensity using just 3 LEDs, although the use case I'm describing is "fully saturated" which is hard to achieve in some areas.
Yes, there are gaps and color mixing isn't great. That said, I did build a color-cycling LED night light and it fills the whole area with solid color across the spectrum (I had to switch to HSV to make that work well).
I _LOVE_ United Nuclear. They have made many chemistry and physics classes so much fun.
Here’s a bit of free advice though: Do not tell a police officer that you have thermite on you. Furthermore, do not explain what thermite is if they don’t know what it is. It is a recipe for a really long day.
Tell them that you're a rail enthusiast, and start going on (and on) about how they use it to weld together train tracks. The more detail you go into about the trains, the more likely they are to want to get away from you.
Thermite is basically a quick, low-tech welding compound.
Unless you actually work for the railroad, talking about welding railroad tracks may trigger "he's a terrorist planning to cause a train derailment" thoughts in the law officer.
Heatgen is a new company that is selling self-heating aluminum cans. As I understand it, it uses a thermite reaction as its heat source. So who knows, maybe having a thermite charge in your pocket might become more common!
That is an objectively terrible design. The video through the first link demonstrates that, if you remove the liquid before activating the charge, it gets so hot it melts the aluminum jacket for the charge. Seems then trivial to cause an insane amount of destruction, even accidentally. Definitely one of the more surefire ways to commit arson, especially in wildland settings.
I've designed a lot of dumb things in my life, but that beats me, hands freaking down. Can you imagine the complete clusterfuck a crashed semi trailer full of these things would cause?
Yeah. Given the propensity for people to be as shitty as possible (Kids, teenagers and adults all apply here) I always try to design with regard for a high base level "people being malicious and / or stupid." It's accidents that always keep me up at night asking "What happens to bystanders caught up in this mess?"
It's funny that all their sales material is very very careful to avoid talking about the reaction and then you read the patent and it's "iron oxide, an oxidiser, and an aluminium can" and I guess if you need to melt tank tracks or have a warm coffee you're set either way.
Why's that not convenient. I usually turn the water off while I apply soap and then turn it back on when I've finished to conserve water. That wait time is around a minute anyways. From talking to international friends this seems to be the norm around the world though I wouldn't be surprised if the average American doesn't practice this.
Not me. Water is on the whole time. I will move the body part I'm washing out if the stream long enough to apply lather, then immediately rinse it and then repeat. I would be surprised if there aren't at least a large minority that are at the two extremes here.
And caffeinated soap has been around a while, and I've been using it off and on. Some are good, some are not.
What does it mean to place a company on probation? I tried looking it up, but can't get away from results about employee probation...ddg and Google both are ignoring my -employee and various other negations to filter the results...
Back in the early 2000s me and a few friends were playing with thermite in a parking lot, igniting tiny piles of it and watching it burn into the asphalt.
Somebody across the street called the police and all of a sudden two cop cars and a fire truck showed up. They saw we were just kids and pretty much just told us to fuck off, which I would have, except I had just put down a sizable pile of thermite on the ground.
Being both a genius(moron) and civic-minded, I asked if I could clean up my pile of thermite first so as to avoid any danger to others.
Then I was asked what that is, so I happily told them about how it creates extremely hot iron slag that can melt through lots of things.
And then me and my friends were interrogated about being bomb-makers, terrorists, or if we were planning on doing another Columbine. They called in the local FBI (who thankfully knew what we were talking about and didn’t really give a shit), we got a long speech about the PATRIOT act, and at the end they said we’re all going on “a list”
Ruined my entire evening and I never got to ignite the big pile :(
Strontium aluminate doped with europium has been the standard in persistent phosphorescence for a while. A large part of the reason I got into epoxy resin craft was to incorporate it in glowing elements, so I have a lot of such items. Some last all night. Some - especially reds and purples - are faint and barely last an hour. More recently, I've noticed dysprosium being added to the mix as well, though TBH I've never noticed any difference in brightness or duration compared to stuff I could get ten years ago.
The one thing I'd highlight (heh) for anyone trying to use this stuff themselves is: be aware of its density. I have yet to find a version that disperses evenly in resin; it tends to sink instead. Might disperse better in glass, but I know little about that craft so maybe it would be unusable for other (thermal?) reasons. If it tends to sink or float in any medium, such as paint, color/glow will be uneven. There are ways to deal with this issue, but they tend to involve extra steps. For example, with resin you can pour many thin layers, but if you want to avoid visible strata you have to go even further with non-planar surfaces and thickeners and such. It's ton of fun, but also a bit of work sometimes.
"Do no not grind the glow powder or try and dissolve it. On a microscopic level, the glow powder works by an energy exchange in its crystalline structure. These crystals are very small and just appear like a fine powder. When they are mixed with a clear medium as we do with our glow paint, the glow powder does not dissolve, it is just suspended in the medium. If you mix the powder with a medium that causes it to break down and dissolve (like water), the glow will be ruined. The same thing will happen if you grind the glow powder. You crush and destroy the crystal matrix and the energy will not be able to transfer between the glow material molecules causing a dramatic drop in glow brightness."
In my direct experience, grain size hasn't made much difference. Also, I use several kinds of very fine dusts/powders in my resin work and I've come to loathe the whole category. They go everywhere at the slightest puff of air, stick to equipment and tools, etc. I already wear a mask, but with chemical (NIOSH magenta or olive) rather than particulate cartridges, so there's that too. Of course YMMV. Perhaps also relevant is that I tend to work mostly with low-viscosity resins because it's easier wrt bubbles and edge creep, but I've had the settling problem even with higher-viscosity formulations. Maybe some day I'll hit on a combination of materials and techniques that solves the problem. Just hasn't happened yet. Good luck!
I believe this is the same stuff that makes up Stuart Semple's Lit glow powder and other such glow-in-the-dark pigments. It's a mix of europium and dysprosium. IIRC what makes it last so long is the addition of trap states for the electrons, where instead of quickly re-emitting absorbed photons they can give up a little bit of energy to remain in the trap state, and are later bumped back out of that state by random thermal fluctuations.
I tried it out on some cardboard and it's almost as impressive as the marketing makes it sounds. I can hold a cheap LED headlamp next to it and wave it over the surface, and it leaves a bright green streak behind that glows visibly for many hours afterward. It doesn't stay bright for very long (I suspect it's an exponential decay), but for such a short exposure I wouldn't expect it to.
The blue version is less impressive because you need sunlight or a proper UV light source to charge it up, but it does work.
By trap states do you mean "forbidden transitions" (phosphorescence lasts longer than fluorescence because the electrons have to go through a very low probability mechanism).
from another supplier about 8 years ago and still haven't managed to use any of it, beyond just being in awe of how well it glows in response to a UV light.
lol, I bought a dozen bright tritium vials as gifts for some coworkers, but I was going to deliver them in person a couple of months later, so I held on to them until then. It was hard to let them go!
Glue one to your deadbolt handle, and you can see whether the door is locked at a glance, from across a dark house! Hang them from your ceiling fan pulls, and no more fumbling around for them in the dark! (for complicated reasons, we don't control ours with the switch) Putting one on your keychain is a no-brainer, but still an awesome idea! And so on...
United Nuclear sells the real stuff like yellowcake for $15/gram [1] so if you've got hydroflouric acid [2], a big gaseous centrifuge, millions of dollars, and a death wish, you can make weapons grade uranium too!
Please don't fool with HF. I don't know you, reader, but I like you anyway.
Bringing uranium into your life almost certainly won't yield the cerebral joy you might imagine. Once you have it, it is a liability and a social responsibility until you can dispose of it safely, probably at substantial cost. If you feel the need to purchase a radioactive source, a sealed source will be much safer and readily transferred/disposed-of.
I've worked with HF and spent about a year coordinating the safe cleanup of someone else's uranium oxide. If offered $19 and the choice to buy a gram of yellowcake or a bottle of wine from the grocery store, I'll choose the bottle of wine every time.
Seriously; neither one is worth fooling with unless absolutely necessary. (A tungsten cube on the other hand....)
You'd want to ship the yellowcake as HAZMAT Class 7 radioactive and it cannot be shipped outside the United States without an NRC export license (probably continental US only too).
The hydrofluoric acid should be shipped as HAZMAT Class 8 corrosive.
Edit: If you're asking why it's legal to sell this stuff, naturally occurring uranium is over 99% U238 isotopes. Extracting useful U235 from it requires some really nasty chemistry, insane amounts of electricity, and very specialized hardware like gaseous centrifuges powerful enough to separate isotopes. Buying the thousands of kilograms you'd need to build a bomb would set off a ton of alarm bells all up and down every major government but small samples for educational or novelty purposes aren't a concern.
Full Quotes for reference " Our Europium UltraGlow® phosphorescent (glow-in-the-dark) powder is the brightest, longest lasting, non-toxic & non-radioactive, glow-in-the-dark material known"
Given there's less than 20kg/10lb production of tritium per year, and a large amount of it seems to go to fusion experiments, how much tritium is there in that vial?
United Nuclear is quite the nostalgia bomb. My first experience with them was in 2008, buying a chunk of uranium ore to trigger a geiger counter to use as a true random number generator. I'd say "where else can you just buy a chunk of uranium ore" but... [1]. Of course at the time it wasn't something you could buy on amazon.
Depending on the answer given to the quiz on the bottom of the Chemistry Experiments page, visitors are directed to one of Thomas The Tank Engine, Disney, or the actual safety page.
The fibers are not in the note but painted on top of them, neither side of the note is the same fiber wise, also they do get wear with usage.
The fibers on the new notes are different, they are more compact and illuminate.
When you have a bottle full of this stuff, is the interior powder getting charged by photons as well via propagation? Or is it only the directly light-visible surface that gets charged and is glowing?
If the former, does having a larger interior volume of powder increase the glow duration, behaving as a sort of rechargeable glow battery? Or does it just generate heat or more brightness while lasting the same duration?
only the surface of a bottle of this kind will emit photons. The emission frequency and intensity is not enough to really make this propagate light significantly. Instead, you would suspend a tiny amount of this in a volume of transparent resin.
Being kind of a maniac for glow in the dark stuff, this isn't quite true. I've filled up flask bottles with glow gravel of this variety and, after a "charge," poured it out -- the interior gravel did indeed get charged. I think you would need much more thickness than a centimeter or two for the interiors not to get charged up.
(Yes, I had a bunch of bottles filled up and arranged on a rope so they would glow softly during the night because I'm weird like that)
Since you seem to have done some experiments, what effect does increasing the bottle size have on the glow? Duration or brightness changed? No visible effect?
You max out pretty fast. Most people don't understand the incredibly wide (over so many orders of magnitude) ranges our eyes (and ears) function over. Once you're in the dark, the glow is quite visible but it wouldn't have been very notable before. And so the absorb-release cycle can penetrate rather rapidly. If I had to guess, with the gravel, that would die off at maybe a few centimeters of depth.
Essentially, you're getting just surface area at a given brightness, despite the interior gravel getting charged.
With the zinc sulfides, they really did take much longer to hit their max charge, although I never measured it.
> Most people don't understand the incredibly wide (over so many orders of magnitude) ranges our eyes (and ears) function over.
For sure. Last year while walking through the woods on a cloudy, new moon, 3am morning I saw a green light piercing through the trees. It was difficult to find because it was over a hundred feet away. Once I reached it, I found a single green LED. It wasn't an ultra-bright variant or anything-- just a normal LED attached to a camera.
I wonder, if one were to specifically design some kind of lamp based on this, what would be the ideal shape to maximize the emitted useful light for a given volume.
My best is a glow-in-the dark Pacman and ghosts. it's a big black plastic board with shapes cut into it with my CNC. Then I backfilled the shapes with the appropriately tinted epoxy which dried in place. Then I have a UV light pointed at the board. At night, you don't see the board, just some glowing figures suspended. Yellow and green work great, blue/red/purple not so much.
I also embed LEDs into epoxy resin that's tinted, which makes the whole thing glow amazingly for very long periods of time.
Just random stuff, really anything that comes into mind.
https://unitednuclear.com/chem_exper.htm. Cracked me up. Now i am going to setup a dexters lab in my garage and blow things up with my 14 year old. Right now he hates chemistry but this should motivate him.
This is far better than the zinc sulfide and friends of my childhood. First off, total glow is stronger. Second, the glow is much longer, almost an order of magnitude to my untrained eye. Third, you can get a lot more variations on color if you're willing to sacrifice glow time. The zinc sulfide of my youth came in green (typically) and red (very rarely) and, if it was paint, smelled bad.
I wonder if the radium dial paint in my Baby Ben clock would emit enough energy to activate the Europium? The original phosphor has degraded to the point where it doesn't glow but it certainly sets off my Geiger counter.
Anyone knows how this relates to SuperLuminova used in watches? There is always much discussion in watch forums regarding how good the lume is in different watches, and this looks like a nice contender.
This stuff's been around a while. I remmeber a decade back, a happy friendly idiosyncratic engineer in a warehouse in SF I know very well, who showed me gleefully all the objects he had cvered in Europium powder. The glow was a little underwhelming, but it was interesting.
also, being concerned about possible toxicity, not really knowing my lanthanide chemistry, I did keep my distance, however.
ah united nuclear, purveyors of high quality reagents for the discerning, jittery, sleepless grad student found in only the most prestigious government watch lists and infuriatingly paywalled technical journals since nineteen sixty-one.
Thats right United Nuclear, a beguiling reminder to mankind that the entire predicate of the Iraq war could just as easily have been a secret santa gift.
it's a slightly poetic and roundabout way of saying "This website will sell you some funny toys and some slightly radioactive stuff [like uranium ore, i guess, from previous comments]. "By the way, remember when the US invaded Iraq because we claimed they had stuff which is [allegedly, maybe, i dunno] remarkably similar to what you can order as a gift from this website?"
A "secret santa" is a gift giving tradition where you pool a group of people together and each person gets the name of someone and buys them a Christmas gift (generally within some price range) but they don't know who bought them the gift. So it's an opportunity to buy joke-gifts for someone you aren't particularly close to, if you happen to draw their name.
In case the vendor is here. I’m guessing cart abandonment numbers are pretty bad. You’re blanking the entire order form when a user checks the box for different billing address. Chrome on iPhone.
Add it to anything you want to make glow-in-the-dark: paints, toys, safety equipment. I know someone who produces small batch silicone adult entertainment devices for sale, and the GITD ones are quite popular.
Doped strontium alluminate is not exactly food grade (though it is considered non-toxic), but that's not the orifice these devices are going in. The silicone matrix retains the vast majority of the pigment, which itself is fairly inert. It has virtually no bioavailability and any of the micrograms of it that might slough off during a session will almost certainly be exuded in short order.
Back in 1995, a friend of mine and some of her friends at the University of Michigan had fun with "Random Destructive Acts via Focused Solar Radiation" using one of those lenses. - https://bclee.net/lens.html .
No images, much less video, to go along with the 1995 story, as you might expect from a time when most people had film cameras and dial-up.
We used a lower quality commercial glow-in-the-dark paint when we repainted our aluminum storms. These are the aluminum surrounds that hold storm windows in place. They are white in daylight, and glow lightly green for the first half of the night. We're happy with the results, although a brighter effect would be better. I'd say go for it!
It's most likely the same chemical formula (so yes, "same stuff"), but phosphors vary quite a bit in their quality based on the synthesis conditions (maybe the "same stuff", or may be better/worse quality than UN's batch).
The description also says: "It can be mixed with glaze and fired in a kiln to make pottery and other ceramic items. Its temperature limit is about 1,200°F."
Hey all, we wanted to thank you all for the support. Orders have been flooding in for our Europium UltraGreen Glow Powder, it's hard to keep up! We've tried nearly every glow powder on the market and Europium UltraGlow is the only one deserving of the United Nuclear name.
A few facts about Glow Powder:
All 2nd generation glow powders will use a Strontium Aluminate base. Rare earth metals are added as doping agents to really make the glow pop. Europium and Dysprosium are common for greens & blues. Some pigments (White and Orange) use Molybdenum. Companies that specialize in Zinc Sulfide scintillators will use the periodic table as their playground, ranging from Lutetium to Yttrium. These metals are absolutely necessary for competitive phosphorescent compounds.
First generation glow powder uses Zinc Sulfide. These compounds don't hold a candle to Strontium Aluminate. Some colors such as Red & Pink are only available in Zinc Sulfide since we haven't mastered the SrAl chemistry of those wavelengths yet. The race is on for anyone who can produce a nice Crimson Red that lasts for more than 15 minutes.
Our glow powder will be viewable for up to 48 hours in perfect 'center of a coal mine' conditions. In the real world, it's viewable for up to 10-12 hours (depending on the pigment). Ambient light is the enemy as this will detract your ability to perceive the glow. This is why we always recommend that you start small to make sure that your imagination isn't selling you on an idea that isn't physically possible. I often tell our customers "Its called glow in the dark powder for a reason, not glow in the light".
You can mix glow powder with nearly anything so long as it dries crystal clear. Our customers have used everything including acrylic, epoxy, casting resin, countertop sealer, urethane, lacquer, oil-based paints, acrylic based paints, latex paints, fabric glue, nail polish, fiberglass resin, superglue, and so on. Glow powder is typically rated for 600C or higher (ask your supplier for exact info) so we've seen it used in glass furnaces as well. What you CAN'T do is dissolve glow powder as it must retain its crystalline shape in order to actually glow. It's recommended that you stay away from solvents & paint thinners.
What ratio gives the best glow performance? Simple: the ratio that allows the most amount of glow powder per unit area. Put differently, people who make glowing Gun Sights and Fishing Lures will want to make a glow paste that contains as much glow powder as their mixture will physically fit. There does exist a saturation point where added layers do not increase glow performance, so we always recommend that you conduct small scale experimentation to see where that point exists.
Most of all: Have fun! Glow powder is incredibly engaging and fun to work with. We have over 15 years of experience with the stuff and its always been one of our most popular items. If you're not sure if this will work with your project feel free to reach out to us, we're more than willing to help. Some of our favorite phone calls have started with "I'm not sure if you're the right guys to talk to about this but I have a crazy idea..."
It's used in miniscule quantities in glow powder. It's commercial use as a pigment/phosphor in display, lighting, and safety equipment far outweighs its use by hobbyists.
In a similar vein I also went and got a ton of the most saturated pigments I could find after seeing some videos about it. To be honest most colors were disappointing. Definitely more saturated than even a good HDR TV or monitor but not impressively so. It might have been more fun in the days where having a monitor that properly covered sRGB accurately was uncommon but now we're used to phones with good dp3 or wider gamuts stretching things out because it looks more vivid and the absolute difference between that and the limit of vision is less of a leap. The ultra deep non-reflective blacks are as fun as advertised though. They made for less an "oh, it's a really dark object" experience and more "a piece of my living room is missing and turned into an empty hole" feeling.
Edit: While I'm throwing out chemistry related party trick items I've always been a fan of element cubes and have grown quite the collection now. The most fun of them all is the tungsten block which is dense enough to catch you by surprise. Be careful not to get a "tungsten alloy" one, it eats away at the density. It's also great to just toss around/fidget with... albeit one of the tungsten spheres might be better for your desk and toes.