Super-simple nitric production

[CFirehawk]

Here is a very simple (safe?) method to produce nitric that I have used without a true understanding of its actual concentration or cleanliness. I can only assume it will be "dirty" and should get some chemistry gear together and do a titration to determine concentration at some point.

Take sulfuric acid 35% (battery acid from the auto parts store), and dissolve potassium nitrate in it to saturation, using time in stead of heat to ensure the saturation.

You end up with potassium sulfate and nitric acid, as the sulfuric replaces the nitrate.

To get the nitric cleaned up a bit and get the dissolved salts out of solution, simply put the stuff in the freezer overnight.

The solution won't hold much potassium sulfate at all when below zero, and it crystalizes out. You now have somewhat clean nitric, using garden store and auto shop ingredients. Just make sure to pour the nitric out of the container immediately before any of the salts dissolve as it warms up.

Ideas? Comments?

 

[agpodt77339]

Concentrate the sulfuric acid by heating before you add the nitrate. This will give you more concentrated nitric.

 

[Anonymous]

I have used stannous chloride (pure tin in HCL) to precipitate gold from AR solution instead of using SMB after neutralizing Nitrates with Urea. The only problem I encountered was the precipitate (gold) was so fine that it went through the slow filter paper. I let the ppt settle and decanted the liquid, washed and dried to recover the ppt. Result was a heavy brown powder. Any thoughts on this subject would be appreciated. TJ(spenmtn007)

 

[Lou]

It isn't pure.

 

[viacin]

sounds like lazersteves cold method, except he uses sodium nitrate. lou, how pure is the nitric acid? Assuming you followed lazersteves procedure perfectly.

 

[Lou]

I was talking about the gold made by adding stannous chloride to chloroauric acid. It will be heavily contaminated with tin.


The nitric should be decently pure, the only real impurity being sodium or potassium sulfate, which is hardly a problem for what we do.