nitric acid from sulfamic acid

[zeocrash]

ok, my mom has just bought some lime lite. being my curious self i decided to look on the bottle to see if it contained hydrochloric acid. to my suprise it did not, it instead contained sulfamic acid. being a name i did not recognise i decided to look it up on the merck index and found it had the formula H3NO3S.
i was wondering if there was any simple way to convert this to nitric acid.
i was playing around with the idea of catylitic breakdown
H3NO3S ==> H2S + HNO3
but i do not know what would contitions and or catylists would break it down

this is not critical at the moment as i have a winchester (cant remember the capacity of a wincester) full of nitric acid in my lab, but my suply is finite, and will run out sometime.

if this idea has been mentioned before, i apologise, but i searched for english and US spellings of sulfamic acid, as well as its alternate name (amino something)

[Mr Cool]

I'm quite sure it is not possible.
Sulphamic acid is formed by reacting ammonia with sulphur trioxide. H2N-SO2-OH. Breaking it down into nitric acid and hydrogen sulphide would require that you reduce the sulphur all the way from +6 to -2 (a lot of reduction!), and this process will be very endothermic, ie, if it occured the extreme conditions would totally destroy any nitric formed, and it would then oxidise your H2S... Plus everything's in the wrong place, the nitrogen's on one side of the molecule and the O's are all the way over on that sulphur, which they are quite happy to be bonded to.
I don't have any way of proving or showing that it won't work, but it won't :p.

It is a potentially useful chemical though... used for making dinitramides, and RDX (in theory, I have not had luck with this method).

[jfk]

Mr cool, what process did you try (link?) because i tried to synth RDX using sulfamic acid andgot nothing either, but surely someone has done it, the link i had was quite osme time ago but the guy who wrote it said hed done it.........


annother thing was looking things up in the MERK index, you gotta look at the structure of the compound. like in sulfamic acid the HNO3 that 'is' in there is not really there as nitricacid - its all over the place, you cant really get it out even if you did manage to reduce it from +6 to -2, which i would say was just short of impossible, and being highly economically unpheasible

[zeocrash]

i was wondering, is sulfamic acid a strong enough acid to catylise the production of AP

[Arthis]

with a pKa of 0.99, sulfamic acid should be ok, considering that it works with citric acid, whose pKa are 3.13, 4.76 and 6.40.

[zeocrash]

pKA?? i'm afraid i'm unfamiliar with that abrviation

[vulture]

pKa = - log Ka

The lower the pKa, the higher the Ka and thus the higher the "strength" of the acid.
Where Ka is the acidity equilibrium constant which indicates how well an acid dissociates.

HA <-> H⁺ + A^-
Ka = { [H⁺] [A^-] } / HA


Where [] stands for molar concentration.

[Arthis]

Noob ! go and take a book and get close with chemistry before proceeding with explosives !

Hey that's a joke man ! I cannot really tells you what it is really by definition, pKa=-log(Ka), where Ka is the dissolution constant. The highest it is, like for H₂SO₄ -> 2 H⁺ + 2 SO₄^2-, the constant of dissolution is really high, so the pKa is very low. So the comparison is: the lower the pKa the higher the Ka so if citric acid has a pKa of 3.13, the Ka will be 10^(-3.13). (blabla in fact) -> the citric acid is strong enough to decompose and give enough H+ ions so the sulfamic acid, which is stronger will give enough H+. So it should work. I guess of course that there will not be any side reaction due to the sulfamic ions.


[EDIT]: vulture answered while I was typing !!!