Sciencemadness Discussion Board - Kits for Sulphuric and Nitric acids

Kits for Sulphuric and Nitric acids

Contrabasso - 22-11-2008 at 04:26

I've just spotted a supplier of "Kits to make" Sulphuric and Nitric acids.

Supposedly these are internationally shippable with no hazard. Is this a credible product or a "too good to be true" www offer.scam

FreedomFighter - 22-11-2008 at 04:42

99% its just an eufemism for real sulfuric or nitric acids on the online sites where you cant openly sell chemicals.

DJF90 - 22-11-2008 at 04:43

Its so that they can sell on ebay without ebay removing the listing due to being hazardous material. There was a former thread on "nitric acid kit" also being sold on ebay a while back. All these listings I have seen are from lithuania.

hissingnoise - 22-11-2008 at 04:54

What an absolute boon to the hobbyist---no home-lab can afford to be without these totally essential pieces of kit!
When will the "oleum kits" come onto the market, I wonder?
I can't bloody wait!!!

hissingnoise - 22-11-2008 at 05:08

That's not nitric acid, officer, it's ordinary water with some nitrogen pentoxide in it. . .

kalacrow - 24-11-2008 at 10:28

...kits?

Nitric acid is easy to make with a few hundred dollars in equipment. In fact, they still do the "smog" experiment in high school classrooms. Ths kicker is the pump used to push the NOx through a line into a container of water.. if it's not PTFE peristaltic or acid proof, it will degrade very quickly.

Sulfuric acid is not hard to make either. Takes a bit more to prepare but it's also pretty straightforward. Again, it's the gas transfer mechanism that is tricky, but no big deal if you understand the hazards.

For both of these, you don't even need serious glassware, although it makes things a bit easier for sulfuric.

I'd be very suspicious of any "kits" ordered from overseas.

If you want to synthesize Nitric Acid, look around for the smog experiment. If you want to synthesize sulfuric, look around for the "lead chamber" method. Study them and you'll se it is very straightforward, and simple to setup.

Look here as well. There are a number of threads on both of these that are good.

garage chemist - 24-11-2008 at 10:40

I think I could make and sell kits for oleum production in unlimited amounts. They'd probably sell really well here and on ebay.
The kit could consist of a super simple 1000°C tube furnace (as a kit), a quartz test tube, adapter, glass tube and receiver. Only chemical required: NaHSO4, available OTC virtually anywhere.
I'd have to charge around 100$ for the quartz test tube alone though, the glassblower wants quite a lot of money for custom made quartz parts.

chloric1 - 24-11-2008 at 14:04

Quote:

Originally posted by garage chemist
I think I could make and sell kits for oleum production in unlimited amounts. They'd probably sell really well here and on ebay.
The kit could consist of a super simple 1000°C tube furnace (as a kit), a quartz test tube, adapter, glass tube and receiver. Only chemical required: NaHSO4, available OTC virtually anywhere.
I'd have to charge around 100$ for the quartz test tube alone though, the glassblower wants quite a lot of money for custom made quartz parts.

GC I was thinking this as well. The cost of the custom glassware alone warrants learning glassblowing yourself. I want to have the ability but I have to wait until I have a garage and about $300 just to get the torches, tools etc. A compromise woud be to befriend a local glassblower and work out arrangements where you could use his/her tools. What about the Unversities? Can a student do the task at a
reduced price?

hissingnoise - 24-11-2008 at 15:23

Aye, right, (hic!) here's my idea for a fuckin' acid generashhion kit---a big fuckin' Birkeland/Eyde generator on your bench an'a ozone thing stuck on the fuckin' end,right, it'll disholve the anhydride, right, any fuckin'n nitric concentration you want, an' here's the brilliant bit---a big bag 'o sulfur, too, so you can stick it in an swirl around so you can get sulfuric, too. What dy'u think o' that, man, och aye!

Fleaker - 24-11-2008 at 15:27

Admirable idea garage chemist, but I wonder about the liability aspect?

I don't think I ever mentioned how much I like that bisulfate to oleum method; it is very impressive. And it's cheap! It makes me have horrible thoughts of using my 1.8 m X 0.10 m quartz tube and perhaps 25kg of bisulfate :-) I also often dream about a massive ketene generator with it as well. One of these days perhaps!

As for manipulating quartz, easier said than done! It is a real pain to deal with it; the only quartz work I've done was making ampoules and a few other small things but I can say that it wasn't too easy with oxymethane. It's incredibly hard to deal with because it loses much heat to radiation. I think one's best bet is buying the quartz tubing cheap somewhere and then approaching a glassblower who has a lathe to grind joints for it. If one has a big oxyfuel torch, it is easy enough to bend a length of tubing for an adapter. It's only the joint part that is troublesome.

DJF90 - 24-11-2008 at 16:14

I actually laughed given the dimensions of your quartz tube! One approach you could try is purchasing a length of quartz tubing (say 500mm?), and seal it off at one end (OxyMAPP torch ought to do it

). Then bend the tube approx halfway along to an angle of 90-100 degrees. If the bore of the tube is wide enough and the length long enough then you should be able to fill the one piece "retort" easily with bisulphate, and the bend will allow you to "distill" into a suitable vessel, so long as you use something resistant to seal up this joint. Or.... you could fill it with SiO2, Al powder and Calgon, and watch the white phosphorus come over

There are resources on glass blowing in the SMDB library IIRC, and, if equipped with a suitable torch, some borosilicate glass tubing, and a little practise who knows what wonderful things you could create. All glass Haber/Contact process plants? Micro scale of course

Fleaker - 24-11-2008 at 16:29

It is a very big quartz tube. Might even be a little bigger than that actually! I have a pretty nice assortment of glassblowing supplies. NERV and I really need to post some photographs of our more recent acquisitions. Alas! both of us are busy with work, most usually having very little to do with the part of chemistry we most enjoy, synthesis! I actually have a ton of things to put up in prepublication, but I can't find the time to spend the hours it would take to collate all the pictures and then upload to the FTP and write and edit the report. Maybe when I have my Christmas week off!

I already gave the V2O5 contact process a crack, and I'm dead positive it would work but I'd rather save my liquid SO2 for something else. Much easier to get a 25kg sack of bisulfate and do it a la Len and garage chemist! I'm glad to see garage chemist back here again after his absence, but I wonder what happened to Len?

Taoiseach - 27-11-2008 at 00:52

I wonder if an ordinary steel pipe would work as a reaction vessel too. Certainly steel doesnt survive conditions of such kind for a long time, and some SO3 will be reduced, lowering the yield. Still this might be much cheaper than buying a quartz tube.