mercury salts

IndoleAmine · Dreamreader Deluxe

Mercury is no fun, and should only be handled by experienced researchers - btw...

capricorn · Tue Apr 26, 2005 9:46 pm

My posts was not supposed to tell what to do and not. The ONLY thing I wanted to say is that these reactions are possible. Then it is up to who ever wants to perform these reactions to determine wether he wants to use the more poisonus HgCl2 or the more easily prepared (from elemental Hg) Hg2Cl2.

And also, I didn't confuse Hg(0) with Hg(1) since I wrote l (liquid) not 1 Smile

Sandmeyer · Tue Apr 26, 2005 9:49 pm

oooopss....

IndoleAmine · Dreamreader Deluxe

Sorry, my font setting and small monitor don't allow me to distinguish clearly between 1 and l sometimes, and in the context of "Hg2(2)" ( Wink

) I associated it with a number when reading over it.

Its nice you told us about the possibility of these rxns, and it is indeed an enrichment to this thread; it was just the order and context in which you posted them, or should I say "how you advertised them"..

(just for explanation: your first post's topic was the conversion of HgCl2 to Hg2Cl2, justified by you through its smaller toxicity. Unfortunately this post was in reply to a method of making Hg2Cl2. When I told you about that, your next post followed about re-converting Hg2Cl2 into HgCl2, this time to support your first post in some way I guess. If you only had posted the two reactions in reverse order, it would've made much more sense! Besides that Hg2(2+) stuff of course.)

Very Happy

i_a

Soap · Thu May 05, 2005 9:16 am

well swim tried the chlorine gas route and was rewarded with a water insoluble gray solid.... so he went out and bought some new mercury tilt switches and tried the h2so4 method. he started by concentrating battery acid by boiling it... forever then adding it to the mercury. heat was applied and the temperature rose.. nothing. he put the hot plate on high and held it there for about 3 hours still no bubbles coming from the mercury. hes pretty usre that the mercury is pure, what are the chances its not? hes goign to go to the store tomorow and buy some kno3 to make some hno3 to try to make teh nitrate salt. what went wrong?

Spacemonkey · Thu May 05, 2005 9:23 am

Well mercurous chloride is only slightly-soluble in water and the grey color could have been due to incomplete conversion.
Have you tried amalgamating Al with it?
Sorry I can't really help you debug your other procedures as I've never attempted them.

Polverone · Fri May 06, 2005 2:25 pm

You probably don't care too much about a few miscellaneous cations and anions tagging along with your soluble mercury compounds if you're just using it for amalgamation. I know that a mixture of hydrochloric acid and ammonium nitrate will dissolve mercury; other nitrates could likely work as well. You only need a little ammonium nitrate so you can get it out of an instant chemical cold pack. I only tried it once. The reaction isn't very fast, but it just needs to be given a shake once every few hours and it will be done in a few hours to a day (depending on how much mercury you're using). There was a slight yellowish cast to the aqueous phase as the mercury dissolved (nitrogen oxides, presumably) but it disappeared after standing overnight. The resulting solution eagerly amalgamated copper, zinc, and aluminum, though there was some excessively vigorous reaction at first with the more active metals, due to the residual nitrate being reduced. I think I may still have some of the "silver pennies" I made with it lying around in a jar somewhere...

Soap · Mon May 09, 2005 8:02 am

swim told me to thank you all for the help. he went ahead and mixed some concentrated h2so4 with potasium nitrate. heated it up, distilled (with slight vacuum, those red fumes are scary!!!) and was rewarded with some nice clean and concentrated nitric acid Very Happy

well adding that in a flat bottom flask to 7 grams of mercury led to a very quick formation of white mercury salt. this stuff is amazingly water soluble (compared to the what hes heard about the other salts swim has tried to make) he added about 1/2 a gram to some al foil in some methanol and after about 5 minutes the reaction commenced. that gray sludge sure is beautiful! Laughing

tom-a-rom-rinbow · Tue May 10, 2005 2:28 pm

cool, i'm impressed that you made nitric acid, good effort.

for future reference, if you have iodine crystals the reaction between .5g Hg .66g I2 in 1-2ml MeOH directly yields HgI2 after a just few minutes gentle stirring. the purple solution can be used as is, or left to evaporate to yield a red powder. swim dreamt approximately 50mg / 10g Al works very well.

he had trouble achieving a complete conversion with OTC 1.5% I2 / 1% NaI soln, even after weeks in the sunlight, repeated shaking, microwaving, etc. the solution did work for an amalgam though.

I2 can be precipitated from NaI with equimolar amounts conc. HCl and 30% H2O2

mmm, amalgams