How-to Make Fuming Nitric Acid (Potassium Nitrate and Sulfuric Acid Method)
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- Опубліковано 18 вер 2024
- I've been needing some nitric acid for my amateur chemistry needs for a long time now. Unfortunately it's far too expensive for me to just buy nitric acid. So I found an awesome deal on some distillation apparatus and decided I'd just make my own. I've been wanting to do this for awhile but the weather in my area has been terrible for the past 3 months. The other day I finally had a small window of opportunity to set up and distill some nitric acid outside. I'm pretty happy with the results.
Now it feels as though a whole new world of possibilities have opened up. You don't realize how needed a chemical is until you cannot find it domestically. But thankfully this is a very easy and straightforward process to do with great results.
For some reason, this is one of my favorite videos to date. I hope you enjoy (:
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20:53 if you just put a small piece of glad press and seal doubled over (two layers) between the stopper and the bottle you can still use it for nitric acid as press and seal is PTFE and I use it all the time for acetone and acid storage in glass jars with plastic or metal lids with good success
I think that a sodium hydroxide trap should be attached to the vacuum attachment, it will turn the no2 into sodium nitrite and nitrate and neutralize the nitric acid fumes, for extra safety
Just a fyi to help with your setup, you can hook a hose to the vacuum port and have that hose hook to a funnel that you put upside down in a beaker filled with distilled water or better yet hydrogen peroxide and let those fumes bubble through it to make some extra nitric acid. Put the beaker that the funnel is in into an ice bowl as well.
Yeah for sure. I admit I kind of forgot about the inverted funnel method while doing this. But at least Now that I see how much "waste" NO2 my setup produces I'll definitely be using the inverted funnel method to try and make some dilute acid along with the fuming. I would like some weak nitric acid to clean certain glassware so that would be a great way to do it (:
Thank you for the comment!
9:07 nitric acid is especially useful when you are refining karat gold below 22 karat through inquartation which initially involves reducing the concentration down to 25% so that the base Metals copper and silver are not protected by gold and easier for the nitric acid to act upon. Reduce it to 6 carat 25% and increase its surface area play melting it and then pouring it into water and then boiling in nitric acid which leaves nothing but 24 karat gold behind. It's much easier to separate the base metals that way because anything between 6 Karat and 22 karat is much more difficult to get at the base metals has the gold protects them from being dissolved because nitric acid can dissolve all the metals used to alloy with gold but not the gold itself as long as it can get at them. This is the only way to efficiently do this in a chemical process that doesn't require a forge and can be done with a simple handheld torch as the last step to returning pure 24K gold powder precipitated from gold chloride solution to metallic gold in the form of a button bar Ingot etcetera as gold has a reasonably low melting point
yeah Nitric acid is definitely a useful chemical to have for gold refining, or just in general for amateur chemistry. There are some silver compounds I've wanted to play around with, and now that I have nitric acid I can do it. The only problem I have is finding the time to do them lol. My personal life keeps me pretty busy, and in my free time I've been on a mushroom/mycology obsession for the last year pretty much haha. I'll probably branch out a little more to different subjects this year though just so I don't get burned out on mycology and mushrooms.
@@randomergy683 my twin brother and I have spent the last 15 years fixing computers and more recently smartphones and tablets so I literally have a ton of gold bearing e-scrap some of it more than old enough to have been made back in the $300 an ounce gold era long past and it literally looks like a computer store exploded in my garage so that's what I'm doing all of my learning with because I've got enough to last another year 42 at least experimenting with small batches the learning curve with $2,000 gold is quite steep and I'm starting to realize the gold recovery and refining thing is at least as much of an art as it is a science which you'll have figured out too if you've ever been on the gold recovery and refining forums where people with high school diplomas who have been doing it for years have to school people with master's degrees in chemistry come to get advice only after they've read CM Hoke's book from cover to cover hahaha
I like the name random energy good choice I used to have a Google account called MattergyWavicles337 until vindictive Google terminated it for calling them out publicly on some things they didn't like me saying because I got a big mouth but it was 100% truthful (another infj thing hard to explain) but it seems that I can't not do that so now I have 7 Google accounts because you can't these two redundant when you're pissing people off left and right if you know what I mean but I doubt I'll ever have another one with that I like as much as MattergyWavicles337 =-(
You could use another container filled with dry sand (sand bath) to heat your round bottom flask more efficiently.
omg you have the exact same handwriting as me. like its almost a little scary how much your handwriting looks like mine
The same handwriting on a keyboard you don't say.... XD (JK)
You could concentrate the sulfuric acid by boiling till ya get white fumes.
Usually 1 part acid to 2 parts nitrate.
I’ve had to repeat the the process after initial nitric acid is formed
You keep it going till it's comes to a solid is when it's done.
Tried that too when I was a kid, my parents cought me yellow handed 😜
Hahaha it's a little alarming when you see your skin turn yellow huh? Xb
I almost made it through unstained, until I got some acid on me while taking my distillation apparatus apart. Ah well.
@@randomergy683 only when you start dwelling on the chemicals that are considered carcinogenic by skin absorption but don't leave stains... Like Nile red story about playing cards in the diatonium bensonate video (I might correct spelling latter)
@@randomergy683 funny part of that story, that wasn't long after a sulfuric acid incident (told that in a comment on ua-cam.com/video/mkJid3hIz6Q/v-deo.html) that I got in trouble over with my parents, so I was trying to convince them they were tobacco stains thinking that was the better option 😕😉 (The tween years are the worst)
@@petevenuti7355 my parents intercepted a package when I was like 15, they had let me do some online shopping for my birthday but were a little too curious when one of my packages came labeled with hazardous shipping labels🤣, they weren't too thrilled with me ordering 98% sulfuric acid lol. They thought I was doing chemistry experiments, but in reality I was not experimenting at all lmao, I was making TATP😂. That was decades ago though, my danger days are well behind me lol. They would have tanned my ass and made sure I never saw the light of a computer screen until I was 18 if they knew what I was up to...🤣
@@TheExplosiveGuy
NI3.
It started to explode as Crystals dried, I panicked and I washed it down the drain.
My dad ended up snaking the sewer line wondering what all those banging and popping sounds were. The whole block heard sounds from the sewer. He was perplexed by the purple smoke. Could have gone much worse.
Yeah they wouldn't have been letting me read stuff from bulletin board systems with my 300 baud modem, heck, I wouldn't even have been allowed in the library...
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing😜
I did it this way and my nitric when I use it is leaving salts after I try to dropx
16:31 roughly how much byproducts are left over as a waste product and can they be used for anything else?
I didn't take any before and after measurements of the byproducts but there will be quite a bit of potassium sulfate that some people recover for use as a plant fertilizer. But I just dumped it out because it wasn't worth the effort for me. At least it's not really a toxic compound or anything that needs to be disposed of with special care.
@@randomergy683Where do you dump this stuff???
Waht is the material and diameter of the water hoses you are using?
It actually just came with the distillation set so I can't say for sure, but I think it's just surgical rubber tubing. I'll take a measurement of the inside and outside diameters when I get home from work tonight (:
This somehow showed up for me but boy are you chatty bro!!! Damn!!!!!
Huh intresting.did u use sleeves or teflon tape.just asking i used tape on a distill video.comment was,"i never seen teflon tape used before"lol.thanks for video.
Thanks for the comment (:
I just used Teflon tape because it was the easiest thing for me to get. Maybe if I did more distillations I'd invest in some of the Teflon sleeves but for an occasional thing, Teflon tape seems to work just fine for me (:
@@randomergy683 thanku for reply..yup those sleeves are expensive ive seen,hard to find?yeah nitrile or buna o rings, and nitric acid ive heard arnt compatiable.nice video.
what are the green clips called?
I call them Keck Clamps but I think they're technically called Keck clips when you're searching for them to purchase (:
@@randomergy683 thank you. oh hey i had a question. instead of distilling why cant they be mixed then precipitate out the resultabt potassium sulfates?
i assume since these same ingredients are used to make flash cotton with only an exothermic reaction and they still nitrate that the nitric acid is made from wet interaction no?
You're welcome. I have seen people make nitric acid without distillation by just filtering out some of the potassium sulfate, but I honestly can't remember how they did it. If all you're wanting to make is gun cotton then you can just mix the sulfuric acid and potassium nitrate to create nitric acid in solution and use that to nitrate your cellulose. I wanted to do the distillation for the experience, and so I had a reasonably pure nitric acid source with as little sulfur contamination as possible.
You left a Lot of HNO3 in the boiling flask ! Water comes over 1rst …..
0:05 it's a Liebig condenser not a Lieberg
Lol sorry I misspoke
Do you have a pressure equalizing addition funnel? I've always seen this done by adding the acid with one slowly, but I don't know enough about the reaction to know if makes a difference. I love how easy it is to make though, I'd like to do this reaction myself since I have literally everything I need including the addition funnel. Fuming nitric acid is some useful stuff, there are all kinds of lovely things that can be done with it. I find it really interesting that many metals hardly react with it (that normally react very strongly with 68% concentrated nitric acid), since there's little to no water to wash away the nitrate salts that form on the surface which protect it from further corrosion.
Yeah the passivation layer that forms from highly concentrated nitric acid is kind of counter intuitive when you first encounter it. But like you said, when you understand what's happening it is really interesting to think about what's happening down to the molecular level.
To answer your question about the addition funnel I do have one. If I ever do a vacuum distillation for nitric acid I'd probably use the pressure equalizing funnel to ensure I don't produce too much acid at once. But the method I used in this video seems to be fairly reliable and robust, and especially at atmospheric pressures its usually pretty well behaved.
Thank you for the comment (:
@@randomergy683 You should do an apples to apples comparison of the two different methods if you ever do a vacuum distillation, I think that would make a great video, I am curious what the yield and purity difference is between the two.
@@TheExplosiveGuy I like that idea. I wouldn't mind trying a vacuum distillation and I think you're right, it would be an interesting comparison. Thank you (:
@@randomergy683 I'll be the first person to watch it if you do, keep up the good work👍.
@@TheExplosiveGuy Thank you. That means a lot (: I'm glad people like some of the stuff I do. I wish I could devote more time to my hobbies but life gets you pretty busy sometimes.
I saw in a video made by nurdrage Using a makeshift process doing something similar to this with the addition of some copper metal that yielded good results using concentrated peroxide or distilled water in the collection container it was packed in ice in a larger vessel that didn't require distillation and I was wondering if you have ever seen or used this method as this is precisely what I need because I have the peroxide and don't have the distillation apparatus and I would like to understand that process better so that I can attempt this with a better understanding as he was a little deficient in details (as you might expect from a video called nitric acid the complete guide comprising three different techniques that's only 7 minutes long) of the concept beyond what was required to follow his specific script.
I can follow his script but I would prefer to understand the process enough to come up with my own so if you can offer more details than he did (I asked in the comment section of his video but got no reply) that would be unbelievably helpful for me.
I'm referring to the second technique that starts at about 2 minutes and 10 seconds into the video at this link
ua-cam.com/video/2yE7v4wkuZU/v-deo.htmlsi=nrcQSBiaQi_0KJRz
Oh yeah I remember this video. I tried this years ago and it did work the way you would expect it to. The simple explanation is you're just trying to divert the nitrogen dioxide (NO2) gasses which are produced by the method he used into water, or concentrated hydrogen peroxide. By dissolving the NO2 into water or peroxide, you can form dilute nitric acid. The NO2 reacts with the H2O or H2O2 to form HNO3. By using hydrogen peroxide, you'll be directly oxidizing more of the NO2 into nitric acid because of the extra oxygen available in the peroxide, improving efficiency and yield. It is a pretty simple way to make some nitric acid if you need some, and you can use the exact method he uses. Nurdrage used the materials he chose in order to show you don't always need sulfuric acid. Or if you want, you can kind of use a hybrid of the method I used here and his. You can see in my video how the flasks turn brown, that's because of all the nitrogen dioxide gasses being produced, so you can simply add sulfuric acid and potassium/sodium nitrate into a vacuum flask, stopper the top, put a tube on the vacuum port, and then feed the NO2 gas into a container of water or peroxide. The only difference is you will have to apply some heat to the acid and sulfate mixture in order to get a decent quantity to carry over to the vessel holding the water you'll be using for nitric acid recovery. It'll be dilute, but it'll definitely be nitric acid.
@@randomergy683 so what role does the copper play I do everything better if I fully understand it and for me to consider something fully understood means I can teach someone else to do it which is quite different from following a script but crucially allows me to improvise as my budget is virtually non-existent being unemployed and all and this helps me make an alternative short-term income until I get the transportation issues worked out and have enough money to buy an e-bike conversion kit because I'm 55 years old have stage 3 hypertension untreated and live in Florida and nobody wants to employ somebody who looks half dead and as if they just stepped out of the sauna if you know what I mean crucial elements think about that might be crucial to know please feel free to volunteer that also. I never finished the 9th grade but I did get my GED and a degree in nuclear medicine some 10 years later so I don't have a background in chemistry but do well with science and learn very fast (got an A in Nuclear Physics first year of college) and I don't have anything to offer in exchange except for my undying gratitude my subscription to your channel and recommendation to my one and only friend (it's an INFJ thing hard to but let's just say I'm one of those exceptionally strange people the likes of which you'll likely and probably hopefully never meet again LMAO) that said I would be willing to do pretty much anything I can do but no clue what that might be beyond what I already mentioned and the fact that I think we're going to return to a gold standard but instead of revaluing the worthless paper rectangles that grow more worthless everyday looks like they'll probably revalue the gold instead of the Fiat currency go figure so the old ceiling $2k looks to be the new floor. If you have liquidity to invest physical gold you can take immediate custody of looks like the way to go in my opinion before they roll out the Central Bank digital currency in likely confiscate the paper. Central banks have been buying gold in huge balls for the last couple of years and just about a year ago gold was reclassified as a tier one asset class and when the people in the know are doing something in their area of expertise that looks out of character like buying gold instead of selling gold and having gold classified as something Banks can use as primary Reserves well it's really kind of foolish to not at least pay attention and follow suit as you can because once the erratic Behavior caused by the reshuffling begins it will take off so fast you might not have time to take advantage easily going to be up closer to 4K or 5K or higher once it starts to make big moves that it will probably be too late to take full advantage of and you can verify all this pretty easily just by looking at the gold spot price for the last 6 months or so and it had a false start already but I suspect it will never go below 2000 again maybe just to visit for a day due to Prophet taking from people who have been holding gold for years and couldn't resist the $2000 milestone. If I had it even a little bit of it that's where I would be parking my assets because people have lost faith in fiat currency government institutions and even Healthcare with medical errors now being the third leading cause of death in the United States also verifiable which is a scary thought. The the entitled narcissistic parasitical class powers that be are self-proclaimed Geniuses that call themselves Elite but nothing could be further from the truth and right now with all the incompetence running all of the most important institutions in society it might be good to have all of your bases covered just in case these fools running everything who can't find their own ass with both hands break something and put the rest of us in a very precarious predicament (I'm sure you've noticed)