rskennymore - 5-7-2014 at 18:56
I have searched the forum looking for information on Iridium chemistry and come up dry. I noticed a few threads mostly talking about sources/prices of
Iridium but none of them seemed to mention any chemistry with it.
I've got some Iridium... What do I do with it? 
Has anyone on here ever done an alkali fusion to get Iridium into solution?
I have just attempted this today in a Zirconium crucible. I ground 10 grams of Sodium peroxide with 2 grams of Iridium sponge and threw it in my 45ml
Zirconium crucible and swirled it over a map gas torch for a few minutes. All of the peroxide melted and swirled nicely onto the sides of the
crucible. Only a small amount of it sparked up in brilliant, but expensive sparks. Not very scientific, but it all ended up going into solution.
After the crucible cooled I clamped a small, round bottom flask over it and pipetted distilled water down the side to convert the remaining peroxide
into hydroxide. Once that reaction finished, I switched to roughly 4N HCl to neutralize the hydroxide. I didn't really pay attention to how much was
added, I would guess 20ml. Once there was no more undissolved material in the crucible I dumped it into a beaker with 200ml distilled water and rinsed
the crucible with HCl.
I noticed there was a bit of precipitate formed when I added more HCl, so I ended up adding a bit of NaOH to it which put everything back in solution
and formed lots of bubbles. I am unsure of how that worked but it did. Common ion effect with NaCl and HCl maybe? I would have thought the ~20 grams
of sodium chloride formed would have no problem dissolving in ~300ml of warm, dilute HCl. Maybe I'm wrong... Anyways.
So now I have about 300ml of basic, aqueous solution sitting in a beaker. I am kind of fuzzy on exactly what Ir containing compounds will be prevalent
in it...
I'm also having trouble finding decent information on the various results of the fusion-leach process... The best information I have found is that you
can precipitate the Iridium compounds as the Ammonium-Iridium-Chloride salt from solution by adding ammonium chloride.
This paper is what gave me the idea for how to dissolve it: http://matjournal.org/index.php?mid=jindex&stage=jlist3&...
Has anyone else done this? Any thoughts? Tips? Wine pairings suggestions?
Took some photos and even video of some of the process, will try to upload it tomorrow if I remember.
Cheers.
DraconicAcid - 5-7-2014 at 19:51
The only thing I've done with iridium was organometallic chemistry. I seem to recall that you can reflux the chloride in DMF, and add
triphenylphosphine to make Vaska's compound.
Boffis - 6-7-2014 at 08:27
I have been looking at this reaction as I have purchased some iridium sponge too with an aim of investigation iridium chemistry so I'm interested in
your results. There is a fair amount of literature on the platinum group metals and I suggest you read up on the chemistry of them before wasting 2g
or iridium! There are too older texts on the SM web site library:
Textbook of Inorganic Chemistry Co-Ni-Pt-PGMs and
Mellor's A Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry Vol 15 Ni-PGM(-Pt)
There are several on the subject of platinum group metal chemistry about too but I haven't seen them as downloads and bookfi.org seems to have been
high-jacked by Facebook.
There are dozens of papers about specific aspects of Ir chemistry available too but much of the more recent work has been devoted to its organic
interactions so the older texts above are probably the best starting place.
Reading the paper you attached it looks like the iridium will be mainly in solution as Ir4+ or more probably of chloroiridate complex.
Keep us posted, I for one, am very interested
woelen - 6-7-2014 at 09:25
I have done some experimenting with iridium, but I have no precise explanation of all the colors I could obtain with solutions of the element:
http://woelen.homescience.net/science/chem/exps/iridium/inde...
hyfalcon - 6-7-2014 at 11:38
Ir/Ru oxides on titanium substrates are used in many MMO anode applications. Google patents have several papers on such things.
quantumcorespacealchemyst - 15-2-2015 at 06:45
Can Sodium peroxide be heated with Iridium to form an Iridium salt, in place of Potassium oxide or Potassium superoxide? wondering if CaO can too
(seems unlikely)?
blogfast25 - 15-2-2015 at 09:36
Jung, D.; Demazeau, Gérard (1995). "High Oxygen Pressure and the Preparation of New Iridium (VI) Oxides with Perovskite Structure: Sr2MIrO6 (M = Ca,
Mg)". Journal of Solid State Chemistry 115 (2): 447–455. Bibcode:1995JSSCh.115..447J. doi:10.1006/jssc.1995.1158.
[Edited on 15-2-2015 by blogfast25]
IrC - 15-2-2015 at 10:48
An interesting PDF, 'The Chemistry of Cobalt and Iridium'.
Attachment: Guerrero_Dec_05.pdf (403kB)
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