jamit
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aluminum sulfate - can I use it to make anything useful
I have fertilizer grade aluminum sulfate. What can I do with it? One thing I would like to try is to make alum, aka, potassium aluminum sulfate.
However I'm at a lost. How would I go about making it? Many experiments on google mentions using aluminum can and KOH and sulfuric acid to make
alum. How can I get potassium ions added to the aluminum sulfate? Should I add KOH? Should I add potassium carbonate?
What other things can you make with aluminum sulfate? I don't necessarily need detail, unless you want to share some, just some ideas and directions.
Thanks.
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Hexavalent
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Firstly, double salts are often right ***** to make as the ions often will not arrange themselves as you want.
Aluminium sulfate, however, is a really nice starting material for making various aluminium salts, e.g. the carbonate, oxide, phosphate etc. via
precipitation and it may have a nice use for some electrolysis experiments, too.
"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." Winston Churchill
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jamit
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@hexavalent
Thanks for sharing your thought on the possible uses for aluminum sulfate. But are your suggestions based on experience. Have you experimented
anything yourself using aluminum sulfate?
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ldanielrosa
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Mix with calcium nitrate to yield aluminum nitrate and precipitate calcium sulfate. Nurdrage has an experiment that uses aluminum nitrate, and this
is a bit less messy than the two acids route.
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ScienceSquirrel
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You can buy potassium sulphate at garden centres.
Alum is a very easy double salt to make and crystallises very well. It is one of the easiest salts to use to grow large crystals.
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Hexavalent
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Really? How would one go about making a double salt then? I've never got them to work
"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." Winston Churchill
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ScienceSquirrel
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Just mix equivalent amounts of potassium sulphate and aluminium sulphate solutions.
Or follow one of the aluminium can, potassium hydroxide, sulphuric acid recipes.
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Mr. Wizard
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Aluminum cans are rarely pure aluminum. They contain magnesium, copper, silicon, and other metals needed to give the alloy it's ability to be formed
into a can. Even the top of the can and the bottom are different alloys. There was a article 10-20 years ago in the Scientific American about the
delicate balance required to get the cans to work as expected. Wickipedia gives this information "The aluminium used in United States and Canada are
alloys containing 92.5% to 97% aluminium, <5.5% magnesium, <1.6% manganese, <0.15% chromium and some trace amounts of iron, silicon and
copper according to MSDS from aluminium producer Alcoa"
Aluminum foil is a more pure form of the metal, as is heavy electrical cable. Be aware some heavy cabling has a steel strand in it's center to carry
the weight of the cable. This strand is easily found and removed.
If you want pure compounds you may want to consider your source of 'aluminum'.
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