Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Growing nice urea crystals

vyper47 - 29-4-2020 at 05:06

Got nothing else to do during this quarantine. Just purifying some urea fertilizer

Dissolved in water, filtered and allowed to evaporate. Found them in the morning

One of them grew longer than my handspan

Can anyone suggest some good syntheses using urea? I plan to make acetamide. I have loads of them, and one USD can get you ~5 kg in my country as fertilizer :D

Annotation 2020-04-29 190611.png - 1.5MB

mackolol - 29-4-2020 at 05:26

You can look for preparation of 3-Nitro-1,2,4-triazol-5-one (NTO). Its synthesis is based on urea and it is quite cheap as it doesn't use much HNO3 but is quite strong. I plan on doing it in the future but unfortunately I don't have any lab burner :'/

Texium - 29-4-2020 at 05:33

If you can get phthalic anhydride and boric acid (or better, ammonium molybdate), you can have a go at making phthalocyanines with different transition metal salts.

Edit: Also if you can get phthalic anhydride, you can combine it directly with urea to make phthalimide, which can be used to make anthranilic acid, and from there you can make methyl anthranilate (artificial grape flavor). You can also do a whole host of other reactions with anthranilic acid by diazotizing the aniline, but I won’t get into that right now.

[Edited on 4-29-2020 by Texium (zts16)]

vyper47 - 29-4-2020 at 08:24

Great :D

Texium, that would be really interesting. I'm actually into the phthalo-based dyes and pigments, and I do have loads of boric acid right now, and a teeny bit of ammonium molybdate (mainly for qualitative salt testing). I'll buy phthalic anhydride as soon as everything opens up. I saw some price lists, and I think I'm gonna buy 500 g, isn't that expensive. Is 500 g phthalic anhydride too less/too much?

vyper47 - 29-4-2020 at 08:28

mackolol

I looked up the compound. Seems like a good EM. And now that you mentioned it doesn't require HNO3, I think I'll look forward. Would be a nice gift for my pyro friends I guess...

I initially used stoves/induction cookers. Can you improvise a similar heat source?

Syn the Sizer - 29-4-2020 at 08:29

No I think 500g is fine. There are lots of things you can do with phthalic anhydride. I have 250g in the mail right now and if I had the money would have gotten 500g. I plan on making phenolphthalein, I know its easy to buy but I just want to make it lol.

Texium - 29-4-2020 at 09:11

500 grams is a great amount. You can do a lot of stuff with that amount assuming you don’t want to work on a super large scale.

vyper47 - 29-4-2020 at 09:11

Quote: Originally posted by Syn the Sizer  
No I think 500g is fine. There are lots of things you can do with phthalic anhydride. I have 250g in the mail right now and if I had the money would have gotten 500g. I plan on making phenolphthalein, I know its easy to buy but I just want to make it lol.


I think that phenolphthalein is way more valuable than the ease of making it. One gram can do hundreds of titrations. I bought a 100 ml 1% solution for titration, and did at least 30 so far. Probably not even 5 ml was consumed

Just curious, how much did the 250g cost? And is it normal grade, or reagent/lab grade?

vyper47 - 29-4-2020 at 09:16

Quote: Originally posted by Texium (zts16)  
500 grams is a great amount. You can do a lot of stuff with that amount assuming you don’t want to work on a super large scale.


I plan to make like 4/5 grams of each dye/pigment, probably do some coloring/gifting, and seal a pinch in an ampule for collection

I gotta buy 500g because not many people sell it locally, so I have to get it from Merck. I know one of their distributors. 500g is the smallest size apparently