Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Elemental bromine

k2976 - 13-10-2012 at 10:24

hi all, I'm looking for 1.25kg of elemental bromine but can't for the life of me find a company offering it to individuals. Really trying to avoid the hassle of making it myself. If anyone could help me out I'd be eternally grateful.

Thanks in advance everyone

Hexavalent - 13-10-2012 at 10:37

1.25kg?

Oddly enough, no company is going to want to be responsible for sending an individual this quantity of an extremely toxic, corrosive and reactive liquid.

What do you need this quantity for?

Sublimatus - 13-10-2012 at 10:52

400 mL of bromine is a lot of bromine. :o

I'd hate to spill or drop something like that.

kristofvagyok - 13-10-2012 at 11:34

1.25 kg? What do you want to do with that? Smoke out the people from a smaller city?

Last time when I worked with bromine a drop spilled on my glove. It immediately "ate through" the latex glove and attacked my finger. I washed it down and took care of it but it had left a brownish mark on my skin. It was just a drop and not 400cm3....

Have you ever worked with that amount of highly corrosive material?

k2976 - 13-10-2012 at 11:48

I plan to use it to make bromobenzene, I've worked with bromine plenty of times. I know it can be dangerous if the proper precautions aren't taken. Maybe I'll look for a different, safer way. This was just the first method I came upon.

Pyro - 13-10-2012 at 11:51

http://www.hinmeijer.nl/product/132531/Broom_99_.aspx
I recently made the mistake of buying 2kg NaBr for 71 EUR! which at 100% yield would give 501ml Br2
it would have been better to not want to make it but buy it in my case! yours might be different.
hope that helped

kristofvagyok - 13-10-2012 at 11:53

Bromination of benzene will produce also some polybrominated aromatics.... A selective route (if you want to work with Br2) is to react silver benzoate with bromine. CO2 will evolve and AgBr and PhBr will be produced...

But. Elemental bromine has much-much higher price than bromobenzene what is a widely used solvent/reagent.

Why do you want to make an easy (and cheap) thing on a hard way?

smaerd - 13-10-2012 at 17:21

If you can buy aniline you could always do a sand-meyer reaction and get some bromo-benzene if the goal is to make it. Again though it seems much easier to just buy bromo-benzene, why do you need so much of it? Woelen has a great route for producing diatomic bromine on his web-site via electrolysis.

jackson2004 - 27-11-2012 at 19:08

Don't buy more than you need. It was very difficult to dispose of an excess 1Kg bromine.

And I can't stress how important safety gear, such as a full protective suite, gloves. and gas mask is necessarily when handling bromine. Preferably use a fume cupboard as getting rid of bromine contamination + smell is near on impossible.

Even the smallest amount of bromine fumes sting / burn on contact when reacting with the water in your skin to form Hbr Acid.

Before opening reagent bottles always chill the bromine to low temperatures as to minimize fumes as bromine evaporates at near on room temperature.

[Edited on 28-11-2012 by jackson2004]

woelen - 27-11-2012 at 23:55

Bromine is bad stuff, but it is not that bad as depicted in the previous post. Bromine is volatile, but not so much as that it nearly boils at room temperature (boiling point is near 60 C). You can handle bromine with same care, also without a gas mask and without full protective suit. It is necessary though to have a good fume hood, or work outside on a breezy day. You also need gloves when working with bromine, because it does destroy skin rather quickly.

After working with bromine you'll have a typical bromine smell in your clothes. Just wash these clothes and then the smell is gone. Do NOT work with bromine inside your living room or another room where you live for multiple hours per day. Bromine smell tends to stick to textile, wood and so on and once your room smells of bromine it takes days, even with good ventilation, before the smell is gone completely.