My 1st (Indium) ITO Screen Experience

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Love it...this turned out to be more involved than I expected but tons of fun! I ordered and received an ITO target, cut 12 grams off and tossed into a fresh HCL batch, gonna need some heat it looks like!

I wondered if H2SO4 or Nitric might do it but the Hydroxide and its properties had me from the get-go.

Keep us posted G
 
Like 5 days later and no visible evidence that the soup has touched the 12 gram chunk of ITO - goes on the hotplate today.

May have accidentally discovered a new color test for Indium! There was a small square of what I thought was Aluminum that came off a small LCD display I carefully peeled apart and left on a piece of paper towel near the soup above. It started turning blue around the edges as it is slowly disintegrating from the fumes of the HCL.

Going to try and duplicate if I can figure what turned blue. Will get a pic up later today.

g_axelsson - a couple pics would be great
 
Pics will be coming later on.

The diluted sulfuric removed the indium from the CPU and only visible attack on the rest of it is a slight discoloration of one side of a solder joint.

The liquid looked clear as water afterwards. I decanted it and added lye until a slight haziness appeared when the pH went past 7. I didn't measure the exact point it switched over, I just winged it with the chemicals. The precipitate sank to the bottom quite fast but formed a thick white layer.

Maybe I should have waited longer, but I filtered it just a couple of hours later. The remainder in the filter was more like a gel than mud but i could add water to the filter now and then to wash out most of the sodium sulfate.

Then I spread the filter out to dry for a day or two. The remaining indium hydroxide shrank down while it dried out, it also turned brown. It should be white but there are probably quite a lot of contamination. Today I put it on a scale and it actually registered, 0.1g (+/- 0.05g) of indium hydroxide.

I put it away, as I need more to continue my experiments. But for a small test it worked great.

Disclaimer : I have no way of testing that I really have indium, but that was the only thing that disappeared from the CPU so I'm assuming it went as planned.

Göran
 
My hydroxide also turned brown after drying on the filter paper.

Below pics of what I thought was aluminum backing (part of LCD design) but notice that something "blue" started eating at it? Normal? It used to look like a small mirror!

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About half of the 12 Gram chunk of ITO has dissolved now after heating just enough to get it fuming - work in progress...
 
weiser said:
About half of the 12 Gram chunk of ITO has dissolved now after heating just enough to get it fuming - work in progress...
Click to expand...

The quality of your pictures is... interesting. :wink:

I have no idea why you got the colors, often colors are just a result from interference in a thin layer, like an oil film on water.

12 gram of ITO chunk? I thought you worked with a screen. If the screen is 12 gram then I would expect the ITO to be no more than 20-30 mg.

Göran
 
"He bought an ITO target and cut a 12 gram piece off for this test."

Yes - another test just to validate any discovered chemistry - sorry for the confusion :)
 
By the way and maybe this needs to be posted somewhere else, remember I brought up Thionyl Chloride?

Well I went to the pharmacy on Saturday and while I was waiting a detective came and stood next to me pretending to be looking at Vitamins.

I know he was a detective because a woman in the store already with a crying child was there before he arrived. When they saw each other he asked her "why is the baby crying", she replied "maybe because you look like a cop" and he replied "I don't look like a cop". As she was leaving she stopped by where he was still right next to me staring at vitamins and she said "bye" and he replied "tell your husband I said hello", she then said "you be careful out there.

Nothing in my life is illegal and beside bringing up a watched chemical can't think of any possible reason a detective would be interested in me.

Crazy!
 
weiser said:
"He bought an ITO target and cut a 12 gram piece off for this test."

Yes - another test just to validate any discovered chemistry - sorry for the confusion :)
Click to expand...
My bad, I forgot about that. :oops:

Göran
 
Didn't forget about this but took on a project that is literally eating all of my time up. I had a beaker with about 12 grams of ITO stock dissolved in HCL, filtered and treated with NH4OH. I had left it sitting while working on the other project and it evaporated leaving long translucent crystals.

As soon as I get a chance I will get some photos and next steps.
 

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