Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Ammonium iron(II) sulphate?

sainandrew92 - 2-11-2012 at 17:27

Hey all,

Just had a lab session and supposedly I used Ammonium iron(II) sulphate for part of it.

My problem is, the salt was white and upon dissolving it in water the solution remained colourless.
I am pretty sure Ammonium iron(II) sulphate should be green and any solution produced should also be green.

Did I just use Ammonium Iron(III) sulphate instead?

nezza - 3-11-2012 at 01:04

Pure ammonium iron(II) sulphate is a very pale green and in solution it is almost colourless. You can test for the presence of iron(II) with any of the standard Iron(II) tests, Potassium hexacyanoferrate(III) should give a blue precipitate. Potassium hexacyanoferrate(II) should give a white precipitate although this is almost always pale blue due to oxidation of the Fe(II) and Thiocyanate should give only a pale red colour. A neat reaction od ferrous iron is with silver nitrate. A crystalline precipitate of silver will slowly form in an equilibrium reaction and no precipitate will form with ferric salts.

[Edited on 3-11-2012 by nezza]

Poppy - 4-11-2012 at 18:33

If you have at least 50mL solution but its low concentration, and if you dont have a precision scale, you can try the poor man's FeII meter I've idealized on this topic (link below).

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=5650#p...
Good luck.

sainandrew92 - 6-11-2012 at 13:40

Thanks for the help guys.

Annoyingly my inorganic lab sessions ended last week, and we had potassium hexacyanoferrate(II) lying around so I could have tried your method nezza.
Never mind, I'll just trust the technician's word.

[Edited on 6-11-2012 by sainandrew92]