When preparing sodium nitrite from Nitrate via reduction you get a product contaminated heavily with the starting nitrate.
Would this Nitrate contamination mess in any way with the praparation of nitromethane from chloroacetic acid if the stöchiometry is adjusted to the
percentage of nitrite present?
sry if this is answered anywhere already i couldnt find itbnull - 25-1-2024 at 16:05
By “heavily contaminated”, do you mean 25%? 50%? If it’s mostly nitrite, it will probably work. Just try it on a small scale. clearly_not_atara - 26-1-2024 at 09:43
My guess is probably not, nitrate is very unreactive to nucleophilic substitution, but I guess I'm hesitant because the product nitrate esters are
shock-sensitive explosives. Still, you need two pretty unfavorable reactions both occurring to get methyl nitrate contamination in your product. As
long as you extract NM with NP solvent I think that blowing yourself up is very unlikely. Sir_Gawain - 26-1-2024 at 09:49
All sodium nitrite has some amount of nitrate from air exposure, so the presence of nitrate isn’t going to instantly kill the reaction. Large
amounts, though, might form unwanted side products or slow down the reaction. Kloberth - 27-1-2024 at 00:45
Ill try the reaction when I have time to synthesize more Chloroacetic acid and i also have to measure the nitrite content of my sodium nitrite, which
is currently cristallizing.
Ill report back and thanks for the info.Ephraim_Bane - 6-2-2024 at 11:22
What are you preparing nitromethane for? It looks like it's mainly a fuel component, if nitromethane keeps giving you trouble perhaps you might try to
make some other nitroalkane?clearly_not_atara - 6-2-2024 at 17:57
I think a key reason is that it's the easiest saturated aliphatic nitro compound to make
Unless that nitroethane from anethole idea turns out to work.
