frosch45

Well, since joining the forum a couple of years ago, I've actually learned some chemistry. I look back on my questions and I chuckle a little on the inside because of what I asked. I made an informative video a few months back about the synthesis of nitric acid. Take a peak and rate it! I've learned a bit since I have joined.

Q: The escape speed from a very small asteroid is only 28 m/s. If you throw a rock away from the asteroid at a speed of 38 m/s, what will be its final speed? I know it's not 10 m/s. I was thinking of saying 28 = sqrt(2GM/Rinitial) to find the mass of the asteroid and then using that to find the final speed when it's thrown at 38 m/s, but then I also realized that I don't have the mass of the rock or radius of the rock, so that's out the window. Really, I'm not sure how to proceed, but this is what I know: Kball final + Kasteroid final + Ufinal = Kball initial + Kasteroid initial + Uinitial + W

yeah, but its a high explosive, and I'm really not interested in blowing anything up, including my hand. i just wanted a little nitrocellulose to make that little fireball shooter and nothing else

I recently watched this video on youtube cool stuff. I do have sulfuric and nitric acids, actually quite a bit of nitric stored in a chemical acid glass bottle, but I only have a little bit of sulfuric left, and I really don't feel like buying another bottle for $50 for my small-scale purposes described below, and its no fun to just buy nitrocellulose from a theater supply store. So this is what I was thinking: I do have a large amount of sodium bisulfate (yes bisulfate, not bisulfite). In water, I'm guessing that the sodium ions will completely fall off the HSO4- bisulfate ion. And although not all of the hydrogen ions will come off of the SO4-2, I think a good amount of them will when I dissolve the compound. So my question is if I made a saturated solution of sodium bisulfate, got it very cold, and mixed it with very cold conc. nitric acid, would it make a solution suitable for nitration?

At 650 °C, copper(II) sulfate decomposes into copper(II) oxide (CuO) and sulfur trioxide (SO3). At 650 °C A home chemist's hot plate can definitely not reach this, even the Corning PC-351 lab hotplate I have can only hit about 540. The only way you could do it would be with a small crucible over a very hot flame. At those temperatures it is hardly feasible to capture the SO3. You couldn't feed it directly into water either because the water would instantly boil because the gas is so hot. You certainly couldn't use plastic tubing, or that cheap stuff you can melt to bend and shape. And SO3 is toxic enough at regular temperatures, but at 650 °C!? YOU WOULD DIE IF YOU INHALED IT, and high temperature gasses (and therefore high pressure gasses) tend to make glassware break or explode, releasing themselves into your workspace. Definitely not a good idea.

oh. that makes sense. thanks.

I was just thinking about this. Space is said to be "cold", but really, because space is a giant vacuum, is it not the case that there are no particles with low amounts of energy floating around to take away heat from a substance? Say you have a 1 kg aluminum block at 500 degrees inside the international space station. You then throw the block out into space through a special airlock door. Wouldn't the block stay at that temperature because there are no cold particles around the block that the block can give its heat to? I honestly have no basis for thought in this kind of environment. Would the above, as I have described it, occur?

Alright then, sulfur is "easy" to burn in pure air. I won't argue with you. When I wrote the first post, I was thinking relatively to what I considered to be "easy."

http://www.angelo.edu/faculty/kboudrea/demos/burning_sulfur/burning_sulfur.htm Don't read the stuff at the top of the page, just look at the picts/video I don't know, if you look at the pictures/video on that page, I wouldn't call it "easy" to burn sulfur in just regular atmospheric conditions, but "easy" is a relative term. It is certainly do-able, but I was trying to emphasize the difference when you use pure oxygen.

Its pretty hard to burn pure sulfur just in air. You need higher temperatures and a high concentration of oxygen. At high temperatures and with a Vandium (V) Oxide catalyst your SO2 will be converted to SO3, but that reaction is reversable.

lol, along that same vein, dyhydrogen monoxide has been making headlines lately http://www.dhmo.org/

I don't want to breathe anything, just have it so dense that it can hold up aluminum foil like the above video. Edit: Maybe I want to breathe oxygen...

put em down anyway!

Ah, that's what I was looking for. I didn't word my question very clearly. I had a bad expierence a with Van de Graff generator. I like to stay away from those

Imagine you had a strong magnet and two metal spheres of neutral charge. Could you charge them by induction if they were brought in contact, then the magnet was brought close to one of the balls (classic induction scenario) Basically, can a magnet be used as the charged object that moves the negative charges around? I would try it out myself except for the fact that its really humid here right now and I'm thinking that the charge would bleed off faster than someone can respond.