Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Means of titrating calcium cyanamide

BAV Chem - 4-7-2021 at 05:04

I've finally managed to make some calcium cyanamide a few days ago. However it's quite impure as it seems to contain a lot of calcium carbonate and probably some other crap like silicon dioxide or calcium oxide.
Now I was thinking of reacting some with an acid to see how much CO2 was released and calculating the purity from that but the aforementioned impurities would probably screw things up a bit as they don't produce any CO2, nor are they cyanamide.
However there might be some other way(s) to measure the purity.
One way I could think of is to oxidize the crap out of everything with some bleach and measure how much nitrogen is produced. Or maybe hydrolysing it and measuring the amount of ammonia produced?

njl - 4-7-2021 at 05:31

I think measuring the amount of ammonia given off during hydrolysis is your best bet. Hydrolyze a known quantity of cyanamide, lead the gas into water, neutralize, dry, weigh.