Amy Winehouse - 14-10-2012 at 18:47
Hey everyone, I have a question:
I need to distill the water off of a slightly acidic solution (a small amount of hcl in it). I don't want to mess up my metal vacuum pump. An
aspirator won't pull a vacuum strong enough for my purposes. My question is how I could use NaOH to set up a trap. My idea:
Fill a drying tube with dry NaOH and place it between the distillation setup and my vacuum.
The traps i've seen that sigma-aldrich sell do something similar to this, but they use KOH, which begs the question:
Will dry HCl gas react with dry NaOH? I can't assume there will be humidity, but is humidity even necessary? If i had an ideally anhydrous hcl gas and
passed it over dry NaOH in an ideally dry environment will it react?
HCl(g)+NaOH(s)---> H2O(g)+NaCl(s)?
HCl(g)+NaOH(s)---> H2O(l)+NaCl(s or aq)
Hcl(g)+NaOH(s)--->jack shit?
Thanks all =]
sargent1015 - 14-10-2012 at 18:54
KOH or NaOH, same thing in this case. Water will be produced so this seems like a good idea. Do you have a way to increase the contact surface of the
NaOH with the gas? You want to make sure that it is entirely "washed" before it reaches your pump!