Explosives fromTerephthalic acid ?

[qashimalik]

hi frends!
its my first thread .
Is there anyway to make explosive compounds from terephthalic acid?Any of its derivatives as explosives...?

[Bugger]

You could try nitrating it (terephthalic acid = para-benzenedicarboxylic acid) , in the usual way for an aromatic. Or you could decarboxylate it first, or reduce it to p-xylene, then nitrate, which would be preferable. It is usually used for copolymerization, to make polyester fibers especially (with ethylene glycol) Dacron/Terylene/Mylar.

Bugger.

[qashimalik]

I welcome ur suggestions.But i need a well detailed and exact info.i want to know the procedure,parameters and quantities of the reagents etc.
Ok...
Let me say, i want to procure picric acid using terephthalic acid as a starting material and want a detailed method of its preparation.Will someone guide me?

[FUTI]

wrong path! Yield sucks...multiple products...most of them bad explosive caracteristics. Try salicylic acid it is easy to find and give better results in picric acid production. And watch your face I saw a face of a man who didn't make that experiment go well. In best case you will stain yourself and be visible to police like chained jail-bird dressed in black and white stripes, and in worst you wouldn't like to look yourself in the mirror. You know little of organic chemistry or else you wouldn't ask that question. Maybe you could obtain trough that procedure trinitro-benzene which is strong explosive as I heard but also a hard one to make. You can make picric through terephtalic acid but it is to much steps and trouble for a simple molecule.

[bobo]

I welcome ur suggestions.But i need a well detailed and exact info.i want to know the procedure,parameters and quantities of the reagents etc.


watch your tone dude, demanding to be spoonfed like that is not done here. Still, the topic is interesting enough.

Carboxyl group in the benzene ring (as in benzoic acid, easily obtained) is not much good, let alone two of them, since COOH is already a deactivating group (but NO2 is that too). I think Urbanski does not ever mention explosive compounds with a carboxyl group (it is not in my memory at least). Which basically comes down to it is either not working or very unlikely to succeed unless you're an experienced amateur who wants to synthesize a crazy chemical just for fun.

Benzene nitroderivatives are harder to get than toluene derivatives. SInce all you're going to get from this chemical is benzene based nitro products, this is why I think you better buy a batch of aspirin :D

Benzene is more resilient to nitration than toluene because it lacks an activating methylene group. This is all well if you want to nitrate it to mononitrobenzene for making aniline. Dinitrobenzene is much more toxic than it's toluene-based cousins, and why bother. The best route to manufacture TNB for educational purposes seems to start out with TNT :rolleyes:

And Bugger, does that actually work, reducing a COOH on a ring to a CH3? I think, oxidizing anything to COOH is easy enough but how exactly would you reverse the oxidation?

[Marvin]

qashimalik,

How difficult is it to follow the rules?

You may not start a thread with your first post, your first post may not be a question and when we look at the question its completely clueless. Its broken logic that you tell us what you can get and expect us to provide something fun to do with it. Read the forum, find out what you need to do what we do, or read the books and add a new suggestion based on what you can get.

Hey guys I can get water and soil and rocks and stuff how can I make an explosive?!?!?

You see how this sounds to us?

COOH groups are electron withdrawing, which makes nitrating a ring with one on more difficult than without, it also makes it meta directing, which is bad in itself. Compound has 2 on oppasite sides, which is also bad, as soon as you add a nitro group the thing is going to want to decarboxylate even assuming it survives the first nitration.

Reduction of COOH on a ring is possible, but a lousey synthetic method by any way I know. To take it back to benzaldehyde youd make an acid chloride, say with PCl5, and then reduce this with zinc dust. Hydrazine reduction may or may not reduce this back to the CH3 group as it would with an aliphatic aldehyde. Its essentially not a useful method synthetically and if you do manage it, you end up with para xylene, which are electron donating groups, but in the wrong place, so theyre fighting eachother and blocking the production of a trinitro compound.

The synthesis is going nowhere because its based on a starting material chosen almost randomly. Picric acid is possible, but youd end up going through chemicals the hard way you can get to easily from other widely available materials.

[kurtz]

Fedoroff mentions the azide and peroxide. Usefulness, and qashimalik's ability to make them, well, that wasn't the question.

[qashimalik]

:D Sorry Guys! there's some misunderstanding here.
I didn't asked about the direct nitration of terephthalic acid(p-phthalic acid).I just asked to know whether there's any other possible way to convert that into any trinitro derivative say tri-nitro-resorcinol(styphnic acid) or picric acid etc.
I m wonder why my question seem to be clueless.There are many examples that early explosives where made from non-explosive and even incombustible materials.
Gunpowder exported to America by Mexico in 18th century was made from Bat excretes. :cool:
Picric acid was first made using "Indigo" as a raw material. :p
I think it would have made my question more clear.
Suppose you have no other option but to use terephthalic acid to make an explosive,what would be your strategy.I guess this will make you think again and again,eventually you will come up with a new idea :D .

[Marvin]

"Sorry Guys! there's some misunderstanding here."
Yes, but not by us.

"I m wonder why my question seem to be clueless."
It lacks understanding of chemistry, it lacks understanding of explosives, it lacks understanding about the forum and its rules. Did I say clueless? I meant clueless.

"Gunpowder exported to America by Mexico in 18th century was made from Bat excretes. "
We know this. Potassium nitrate was made from animal dung and urine for over a thousand years, it would not be surprising even if we didnt know it.

"Picric acid was first made using "Indigo" as a raw material. "
We know this, the end point of treating most organic matter containing benzene rings with conc nitric is picric acid anyway.

"I think it would have made my question more clear."
It is clear. You can get terepthallic acid, you want to make an explosive out of it, but dont know what explosive or how and you argue that its in our best interests to work it out and tell you. We arnt that stupid and we also know the best option is to move over to other things.

Is it impossible? No, but if it was a choice between using that or making one from air and water, Id opt for air and water and we have thousands of possible precursors before I'd have to sink that low.

"I guess this will make you think again and again,eventually you will come up with a new idea"
Grow up.

[Dave Angel]

It is good to see someone speaking sense Marvin.

qashimalik: This thread should have been made in the water cooler, but even more preferably made as a post to an existing thread on phenol. The very first post itself should not have been made as it is. You should have done as much research as possible on it before making the post and included your research in it.

As Marvin pointed out, it's pretty damn obvious that you have just found a chemical you can lay your hands on and want us to work out how to make it into an explosive. Having read the rules, you should have fully expected to have been banned outright for posting that first post you made. The second one isn't any better. Even after recieving information about possible routes you still demanded exact details, rather than going off to read up on decarboxylation methods etc. to work it out yourself.

And you used "ur" rather than your! :rolleyes:

Whilst I'm at it, Bugger may want to read the bit in the rules that goes:

You will not use your username as your signature as well. If your username is "HAL9000", then you will NOT use "HAL9000" anywhere in your signature, nor at the bottom of every post. It's redundant since your username is always included next to your posts anyways.

It irks me for some reason, but importantly, it irks whoever wrote the rule!

Apologies to other members if this came off as a rant, I usually try to restrict most of my postings to results of my practical work, or discussion of useful information. The only useful information worth giving to make this post somewhat on-topic is to reiterate that it is so much easier to make TNP from ASA than to try to find a route from terepthallic acid. I'm all for a bit of originality in synths, but such novel routes are usually better recieved at MSDB, though vulture didn't seem to agree with your 'spoonfeed me' style post either.

In typing this reply, I am considering whether it is even worth posting and may be objectionable to the mods; an attitude a few others seem to need to adopt. Despite it not being quite on-topic, I will post, as I wish to add to the concerns I have seen others raising over the quality of some postings recently.