Salts might be a little too basic, no pun intended. I mean, we all know how to mix acids and bases. I'd probably include only salts that are
difficult or inconvenient to prepare from acids and bases, or that you can't just make from acids and reactive metals. (Any guesses how one would
prepare zinc (II) nitrate?)
It would be more interesting, I think, to include less obvious synthesis methods (ie, you can make zinc cyanide by combining two molar units of of
potassium cyanide with one molar unit of zinc sulfate; the zinc cyanide isn't water soluble and precipitates out.) Or things like dry ammonia gas,
which you can make by heating acids like phosphoric and sulfuric acid, as long as they're bound to at least two ammonium molecules; the other one is
harder to drive off. You can also make dry ammonia gas by heating urea (it will give off water at first, but when it gets hot enough to give off
ammonia gas, it's pretty dry) which will also give you cyanuric acid as the stuff left behind. If you instead mix potassium carbonate (I think
hydroxide works too) and urea, you still get ammonia (and CO2), but now you're left with potassium cyanate at the end.
You should also mention things that can go wrong, so that people don't make common mistakes. For example, if a reaction starts generating chlorine
gas and this is a bad thing, what should you have on hand to stop it? Answer: sodium thiocyanate. I once accidentally made a sodium hypochlorite
solution acidic without realizing it, and chlorine started being generated. My first (very incorrect) thought was, oh I'll just add some acetone,
since then the chlorine will get tied up in the haloform reaction and will precipitate out as chloroform. Nope, under acidic conditions, acetone only
gets chlorinated once or twice, and you get a very potent tear gas, which I learned the hard way. At least it doesn't stick around and get absorbed
into anything plastic, like benzyl chloride (the result of mixing hydrochloric acid and benzyl alcohol) does. And at least that chlorine wasn't being
generated from acid and hydrogen peroxide. Putting acetone in that mixture could have lost me a hand or more.
The reactions to avoid are always important for people to know, because even if people can misuse them, you're far more likely to save someone than
you are to hurt anyone. Most dangerous chemicals have their syntheses posted on Wikipedia anyway. Plus, it's kind of fun to read about horribly
dangerous chemicals that are shockingly easy to make.
If you haven't read any entries in Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry, you probably should, just to get a good idea of how well-written
chemical production literature generally looks. I'll attach the article on oxidation, because it covers so many bases, whereas the other articles
tend to be more specific. That's a good style, but if you wanted to do this type of project, definitely more focus on home/amateur chemists as
opposed to industry. |
