Formaldehyde => Paraformaldehyde

This reaction has caught my attention. Aftering reseacrhing a bit I was able to find what I deemed to be an acceptable way of synthesisizing formaldehyde. Well, thats only part of the solution.

Doing a search here at Science Madness, I turned up the following:

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=183

Which is exactly what I wanted. Or rather, so I thought. There arent much details in that thread, and defiently no reports if the method even works.

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=1277

While mostly about the purification of paraformaldehyde, it does go on about obtaining paraformaldehyde from hexamine. I know at the very least, I can get hexamine on ebay, for now anyway. Maybe later on I will look up synthesisizing hexamine, but thats just more work (as though all this isnt).

Searching on google and yahoo didnt yield much, however, I was able to find a lot of information about polymerization inhibitors. I found this intresting because it appears that formaldehyde would be easy to polymerize. For example:

http://www.answers.com/topic/formaldehyde

"In water, formaldehyde polymerizes, and formalin actually contains very little formaldehyde in the form of H2CO monomer."

http://www.nclabor.com/osha/etta/indguide/ig31.pdf

All that says is that polymerization occurs at low tempatures.

So basically, it *seems* as though this should be easy, since people goto such great lengths to prevent it.

I have a few ideas bumping around in my head but nothing concrete. Any help would be appreciated.

Edit:

Oh and slightly (completely?) off topic...

Hexamine seems rather easy to make, just some formaldehyde and ammonia...

Edit:

Most intresting... After reviewing some patents I have found numerous ways to make paraformaldehyde... However all require no less than 70% formaldehyde. Then I found the following:

"As a method for producing a paraformaldehyde of a high formaldehyde content (hereinafter referred to as "high concentration paraformaldehyde", the following is known. That is, formalin containing about 37-50% of formaldehyde is subjected to a concentration treatment such as vacuum concentration to produce a highly concentrated aqueous solution of formaldehyde containing about 80% of formaldehyde, and the resulting highly concentrated aqueous solution of formaldehyde is cooled and solidified by means of a cooling apparatus and a pelletizing column to form paraformaldehyde containing about 78-83% of formaldehyde in the form of particles or flakes (hereinafter referred to as "conventional paraformaldehyde". Then the resulting conventional paraformaldehyde is dried at a temperature not higher than the softening point of the conventional paraformaldehyde by means of hot air drying or far infrared ray drying [Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. Hei 2-167244 (1990)]. "

Another patent mention distilling under a vacuum to achieve 80% purity... If possible, this would allow for a simple paraformaldehyde synthesis using NaOH as a catlyst (according to yet another patent).

Patents

[Edited on 28-8-2005 by Duster]

Maybe it would be possible to prepare an AN/ice bath, therein a flask with *slightly* diluted H2SO4, and the dilute(in my case 20%) formalin solution dropped in under stirring.... if polymerization does not start, some mg of AP might be added...

[Edited on 19-11-2005 by BASF]