In the EU the purchase of red P is not an issue. I already purchased this element multiple times, my last purchase was at 4N purity real red P, free
of white P, for my element collection. I also have samples of other purities and I have it in the form of a very fine powder, but also much coarser
(like sand) material.
You have to be careful with buying red P though. There is good quality and safe red P, but there also is really dangerous and inferior stuff. Some
sellers have red P, which contains a lot of white P. One of the members on sciencemadness (belgian member pyro) had a terrible fire when he took some
red P from its container (he documented what happened on sciencemadness, you can find it all back with some searching, and he almost lost his father
in the fire). At that time I happened to have 200 grams of red P from the same seller and this stuff had a pungent smell of white phosphorus. After
pyro's accident I decided not to use that crappy red P and buy a new sample from a more reputable supplier. The inferior red P was very cheap (just a
few euros per 100 grams, 30 euros or so per kg) while having a purity of better than 99.8%. That low price made me buy it. It may contain 95% red P
and 4.8% white P and still be listed as 99.8% pure phosphorus! Good quality red P only has a faint smell of white P. Really good stuff is odorless. If
it has a very strong smell, then be careful, it may ignite spontaneously on a warm summer day when taken out of its container!
The production process of red P inherently leads to contamination with white P. It is made by heating white P and allowing the phosphorus to sublime
into a solid at a quite high temperature, so that it settles as red P. In this way you get very pure phosphorus, but the final product may be an
allotropic mix instead of a single allotrope if the process is not controlled precisely. |
