Today I was making a pastille of Niobium Pentafluoride powder. The procedure includes a 6 ton squeezer, precision wipes, silica gel, filter papers and acetone.
The first suspicious part was that on product details, $NbF_5$ was suppossed to be $5\mu m$ powder. Instead it looked like having hair(forgive my bad terminology but I am not a chemist, but a physicist and I don't know how to describe it).
The procedure is the following.
- Acetone and wipe papers$\rightarrow$clean squeezers parts(made of stainless steel)
- Powder gets into the squeezer(using a funnel made of the filter paper) and gets pressed
- The powder becomes a pastille.
- It is stored in a plastic bottle, with Silica gel.
The filter paper is also used to fill the bottle with silica gel(as a funnel) as well as a way to store the pastille while filling the bottle with silica gel.
I have made several pastilles with the exact same recipe(i.e. $B,\;ZnF_2,\;LiF$ etc) and everything went fine. This powder however became very sticky. I have also noticed that while it's stored in the silica gel box, there are some drops inside the bottle.
So I have some questions... First of all why did it became sticky and secondly why the powder wasn't actually a powder?Is it typical for $NbF_5$?