i need to know where cupperchloride dissolves in to form anhydrous
alcl3. If i have absolute ethanol and react some aluminium with cucl2 and than remove the ethanol by evaporation wil i have some anhydrous alcl3 ?? is
it possible to heat alcl3 in a solvent to make it
anhydrous ??
thxclearly_not_atara - 26-11-2017 at 13:23
Does ethanol react with AlCl3? That should be your first question. Otherwise, reacting solvated CuCl2 with Al seems like a clever idea. Maybe find a
nonpolar solvent that will dissolve CuCl2. Wikipedia tells ms CuCl2 is soluble in acetone... Maybe use acetone instead of ethanol?Mn2Dc - 26-11-2017 at 14:51
yeah i will try acetone and chloroform and dcm woelen - 27-11-2017 at 06:36
CuCl2 indeed dissolves in acetone, giving a brown solution.
Such solutions are not very stable though. I once kept such a solution around for many days, and when I came back to it the liquid was colorless and
there was a thin layer of a white solid at the bottom. I think that the white material is CuCl, but I did not test it.
So, if you do your experiment, the reaction between Al and CuCl2 must be fast, otherwise the reaction between CuCl2 and acetone interferes.
If any AlCl3 is formed, are you sure that AlCl3 does not react with acetone? It is nasty stuff and horrible on storage (almost as nasty as PCl5, PCl3
and POCl3).JJay - 27-11-2017 at 07:18
I have also dissolved copper (II) chloride in acetone, but I didn't have any luck reacting the solution with aluminum, though I didn't pursue that
line of experimentation for very long. Things that might work (and vary in their levels of danger) are heat, iodine, or amalgamation.
I have read that AlCl3 can cause acetone to polymerize at room temperature over the course of a few days, and I have also read that it is very
difficult to separate it from acetone.
I tried making AlCl3 reacting hydrogen chloride with aluminum at around 700 C, but although there was some white sublimate and a weight increase,
liquid aluminum flowed out of hot zone and contaminated the aluminum chloride. This could probably be avoided most conveniently by putting the
aluminum into a boat, but I didn't have one that would fit into the quartz tube at the time, and I grew weary of gassing myself repeatedly with HCl. I
have a fume hood now and I'm getting some ground quartz tubes and a PID controller next week and might attempt AlCl3 in a tube furnace again, but on
paper, aluminum bromide looks easier to make and purify.
ZnCl2 reacts less vigorously with aluminum than CuCl2, and useful amounts of AlCl3 can be produced with it. And for some reason that I do not fully
understand, ZnCl2 is easier to find than AlCl3.woelen - 27-11-2017 at 07:30
Anhydrous ZnCl2 is quite mild compared with anhydrous AlC3. It can be stored in a normal plastic container (HDPE). AlCl3 on the other hand is very
hard on storage. It can only be stored for a,long time in a glass bottle with a teflon-lined cap or in fully sealed glass ampoules. Standard plastic
bottles rot away with AlCl3 in it. They become blistered in a few weeks of storage and leak a lot of HCl and on the outside they feel wet.
If I open my bottle of AlCl3, then a big cloud of HCl-fumes escape from it, when I unscrew its cap. The bottle also is pressurized of HCl gas.JJay - 27-11-2017 at 07:35
That makes sense. I have always stored AlCl3 in a glass media bottle with a PTFE-lined cap, but I've never had more than 10 grams of it at a time. I
didn't notice any fumes, but it did degrade noticeably in storage.Chemi Pharma - 27-11-2017 at 11:53
@Mn2Dc, you'd better try the chemplayer's experiment at You Tube, since he used aluminium powder and anhydrous zinc chloride to make anhydrous
aluminium cloride with 36% yield:
I think Chemplayer lost a substancial amount of the product when it fumes out the reciever flask while it's condensing. The yield could be better. May
be he should have used a longer tube that went inside the reciever flask until the bottom.aga - 27-11-2017 at 12:08
The hard part of doing this reaction in the liquid phase is finding a solvent that will dissolve AlCl3 without reacting with it, or with aluminum
metal. Those are some tough criteria to meet, and the only solvent I had that met them was diethyl ether. I'm pretty sure I got something
by reacting an aluminum/galinstan alloy with anhydrous HCl in diethyl ether, but I had no way of quantifying yields at the time.
edit: Best source I could find regarding AlCl3 solubility:
Note that this does not specify whether the solvent reacts with aluminum metal.
[Edited on 11/28/17 by Melgar]clearly_not_atara - 28-11-2017 at 11:47
Nitrobenzene might be a winner. I know that sodium can be electrolyzed from NaAlCl4 in nitrobenzene so Al is probably safe. I would definitely start
on a small scale, though. Melgar - 28-11-2017 at 18:49
Nitrobenzene might be a winner. I know that sodium can be electrolyzed from NaAlCl4 in nitrobenzene so Al is probably safe. I would definitely start
on a small scale, though.
I'd expect the aluminum to reduce the nitro group, producing aniline, no? It can reduce aliphatic nitro groups easily enough, and aromatic nitro
groups are even easier to reduce.
[Edited on 11/29/17 by Melgar]clearly_not_atara - 28-11-2017 at 19:38
I absorbed that information from BromicAcid's post several years ago. I was unable to find the reference he cited, although I did find out that Chem.
Zentr. is Chemisches Zentralblatt and that Mem. Inst. Chem. Acad. Sci. Ukrain, SSSR is Memoirs of the Institute of Chemistry
published by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
I think that nitrobenzene may not be so easy to reduce in the absence of protons. With protons it is probably reduced quickly by aluminum. The 1980
paper by Galova may help us here.
[Edited on 29-11-2017 by clearly_not_atara]
Attachment: galova1980.pdf (701kB) This file has been downloaded 303 times
