learningChem
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sodium carbonate - wikipedia - what?
I was wondering if sodium carbonate could be thermally decomposed to sodium oxide - it seems the answer is "no".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_carbonate
mp 851 - boils at ~1630
Funny thing is, according to wikipedia too...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_bicarbonate
"Above 70 °C, sodium bicarbonate gradually decomposes into sodium carbonate"
"Further heating converts the carbonate into the oxide (at ca. 1000 °C):
Na2CO3 → Na2O + CO2 "
Am I misreading something, or is the sodium bicarbonate article laughably wrong?
[Edited on 13-8-2012 by learningChem]
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Poppy
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Some reactions occur indeed but at some punky ridiculius rate!
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ScienceSquirrel
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Some decomposition may occur at above a 1000 C but it is very slow and not practical as a means of making sodium oxide.
Look at the use of calcium carbonate which was converted to calcium oxide, slaked to produce lime and then reacted with sodium carbonate to produce
sodium hydroxide, this remained the route to caustic soda for a very long time.
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Nicodem
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What is laughable is to blindly believe Wikipedia without checking the references.
First of all, it is an encyclopedia, thus a tertiary source, which means there could have been several mistakes done in the interpretation and
citation. Secondly, it is a freely editable encyclopedia that is simply too huge to peer review. We are lucky that it is as good&bad for chemistry
as it is. It could be much worse.
…there is a human touch of the cultist “believer” in every theorist that he must struggle against as being
unworthy of the scientist. Some of the greatest men of science have publicly repudiated a theory which earlier they hotly defended. In this lies their
scientific temper, not in the scientific defense of the theory. - Weston La Barre (Ghost Dance, 1972)
Read the The ScienceMadness Guidelines!
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learningChem
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Thanks for the replies =]
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Antimony Pentafluoride
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Ahahah wikipedia :p
I checked Patnaik's Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry (<3) to see if there was any mention of the thermal decomposition to sodium oxide, and there
was not. However, it does say that sodium monoxide can be produced by reacting sodium metal with nitrous oxide (maybe by passing a stream of nitrous
oxide into molten sodium? idk, the book did not specify conditions for the reaction).
Alternately if sodium is heated to below 160° (presumably between 120 and 160) with a limited oxygen supply, the monoxide is formed. That sounds
pretty tricky. iirc Nerdrage made sodium peroxide (and probably a tiny bit of the superoxide) by passing a stream of oxygen into sodium that had been
heated in crucible.
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Fossil
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Actually it was Myst32YT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqEWUw6sgpA&feature=plcp
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Antimony Pentafluoride
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Whoops, my bad. Thanks for the correction.
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