weird white precipitate

[THErAPIST]

Um hi.. I know I havent been of much help to anyone here quite yet but if anyone could help me with this I would be greatful.

I was going thrue and reading some of the files on my comp today since I stayed home from school and had nothing better to do, when I came across a synthesis for nitrocellulose which I had gotten from brainfevers site. Seeing as how I was bored I figured I'd go attempt to make some. I went and got my H2SO4 and the 2g of papertowel I would need, and then I went to get my KNO3 and realized I didn't have enough. Well i grabbed this bottle of stuff that I've had laying around for about 4 months now. I produced the stuff that was in the bottle by mixing about 25 grams of road flare innard with about 15 grams of KNO3 in warm water. Then I filtered off the stuff that wouldn't dissolve and I let the water evaporate. What I was left with was about 30 grams of a yellowish crystalline solid. I assumed this crystalline solid was about 50% KNO3 and about 50% calcium nitrate. (I may be wrong but i think Calcium nitrate makes things burn with a red flame...). I figured I'd either get nitrocellulose or nothing at all if I used this bottled stuff so I said what the hell and decided to give it a try. ( I was thinking that CNO3 has near the same nitrating ability as KNO3)

Anyways, I went outside and measured out my 30 mL of H2SO4 and put it in a beaker. Then I added 25 grams of the supposed KNO3/CNO3 to the acid. nothing happened so I started stirring it. At first the mixture got kinda cloudy and then to my suprise everything in the beaker turned extremely white. It was the same color as HMTD. so I quickly touched the beaker to see if it was warming up and again I was suprised because the beaker was rather cold. I stirred it for a few more seconds and then let it set there for about 10 minutes. When I came back I tried to stir it and found that it was about as thick as yogurt. As of now I have filtered and dried the white precipitate. I have about 10 grams of this stuff. It's about as fine as baking flour and it sticks together when you squeeze it with your fingers. I have tried to light some of it with a match and it did nothing at all. Tomorrow I'll do an impact test to see if it does anything. I'm pretty sure it's still some kind of oxidiser since two oxidisers went into it (I think) but does anyone think it will detonate? Maybe it's like AN, it's an oxidiser yet it detonates. I'm not all that great at chemistry yet so if anyone knows what this stuff is or if anyone can help me then please do.

----------------------------------------
use correct chemical formula as it is misleading and makes you look stupid when you don't - kingspaz

<small>[ February 16, 2003, 01:01 PM: Message edited by: kingspaz ]</small>

[Aaron-V2.0]

The nitrate in road flares is Strontium Nitrate, very nice for red coloring in fireworks. The nitrate actually has two NO3 groups on the Sr, so that would make it a dinitrate (I'd imagine.)

So possibly one NO3 group went to the cellulose and the remain SrNo3 is leftover, although there is no known SrNO3 on chemfinder...

This is confusing. :(

EDIT: Also Strontium Nitrate is a white powder, so there may be another chemical in your flare that's causing the white precipitate.

My road flares are also a yellow powder with woodchips. Hmm.

EDIT 2: Upon further thought the yellow is probably Sulfur, and also Strontium Carbonate is a red coloring agent, so that'd clearly screw the reaction up.
----------------------------------
di, tri, tetra, etc are only applied to organic compounds so strontium nitrate, having two NO3- ions (not groups), is simply called strontium nitrate - Sr(NO3)2
also use correct chemical formulas, a simple seacrh on google will find it - kingspaz

<small>[ February 16, 2003, 01:04 PM: Message edited by: kingspaz ]</small>

[THErAPIST]

AH! YEA! THANKS! I was goin nuts over here tryin to think of SRNO3 because calcium nitrate just didn't sound right. :p

My road flares had a brownish colored stuff in em that also had wood shreds in em. Looked almost like really weird dirt...

<small>[ February 11, 2003, 11:34 PM: Message edited by: THErAPIST ]</small>

[a_bab]

What you got there is SrSO4, isoluble as BaSO4. You'll better read some more chemistry before mixing up things without knowing what will happend! And if you'll gonna detonate the SrSO4 I'll kill myself.

[Machiavelli]

The effect when you mix any nitrate with concentrated sulfuric acid is that HNO3 which is the weaker acid is driven out and you get HNO3 and sulfates. So if you start with Sr(NO3)2 you'll get SrSO4.
The Sr-ion is has a positive charge of 2 units, it's 2+ while the Nitrate-ion is 1- and Sulfate is 2-.
So the reason that you don't get SrNO3 is that this is a charged compound, it would actually be (SrNO3)-.
Your precipate is probably a mix of K2SO4 and SrSO4. Anybody knows what else is in these road flares?

[THErAPIST]

Update: The white powder i got is soluble in warm water so i decided I'd mess around with it a little. I decided I'd see if i could put this into a batch of HMTD to get some different effects.
In a 250mL beaker I put 50mL of warm 6% H2O2. to this i added 3G of this white powder and I stirred untill it dissolved. Next I put in 5G KNO3 and stirred till it was all dissolved. finally I added 40mL of H2SO4 about 10mL at a time(I think its at about a 90% conc.) and i stirred it for another minute or so. I left the mixture outside over night under a plastic bowl (it was really cold out. something like 30º F. I got home from school today and checked it and found that I had some white precipitate. There were two layers to the precip, one layer looked like a solid on the bottom of the jar and then there was a thicker much more fluffy layer ontop of that and then there was more fluffy stuff floating ontop of the mixture. I filtered, washed, and dried the precip, and I was left with 4.75g of precip (the crystals are a little bigger than regular HMTD crystals). Then I went to flame test some of it. Normally when I flame test HMTD it just gives a somewhat bright flash with a whoomph kinda noise. However, this stuff flashed extremely brightly blinding me for a couple seconds and it didn't make much noise. I have 1g pressed into a drinking straw that I will detonate tomorrow. If anyone is interested, I'll post results and I'll link to all of the pics I have collected over the last couple days of this stuff and what it does.

<small>[ February 13, 2003, 11:42 PM: Message edited by: THErAPIST ]</small>

[kingspaz]

solubility is greater in warm water than cold. also the addition of H2SO4 will have made some HNO3 from the nitrates you added. a byproduct of this is sulphates - SrSO4 and K2SO4. these are distinclty less soluble than their nitrate counterparts so will precipitate. this will be greatly increased by cooling the solution. so basically you have some sulphates and HMTD most likely.
i'd also like to add that adding a bunch of anything that you don't know shit about into an HMTD reaction mixture is fucking stupid. if you want to find out more about it then learn some fucking chemistry and do some research.
edit: i'd also like to add that machavelli has already told you what it is and if you'd bothered to do a little research then you'd have found out that sulphates are pretty inert and generally useless.
:mad: :mad:

<small>[ February 16, 2003, 01:12 PM: Message edited by: kingspaz ]</small>

[Machiavelli]

Well Therapist, now the flashing part sounds like nitrocellulose but the crystals don't, anyway it's a bit hard to tell what it is exactly since you're happily mixing every shit standing around the lab without really knowing what you're doing, kinda like the AP whores from lesser boards.
So please improve your chemical knowledge and in the meantime at least try to use only pure chemicals, don't modify established procedures and refrain from doing anything on a large scale.

As an alternative, you could just go on like this while at the same time starting to practice eating, typing and similar manual activities using your feet.

PS: "brownish colored stuff" is about as useless as you can get with an answer

<small>[ February 16, 2003, 04:50 PM: Message edited by: Machiavelli ]</small>

[THErAPIST]

Sorry... I can assure you that I wasn't just mixing everything around. I usually use H2SO4 and AN or KNO3 in my HMTD mix, so that wasn't anything new. I agree that I probably shouldn't have thrown the other stuff in there and I also realize now that I should learn a good bit more about chemistry before I do anything else. thanks for tellin me about the sulfates though. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Frown]" src="frown.gif" />

<small>[ February 17, 2003, 10:11 PM: Message edited by: THErAPIST ]</small>

[Machiavelli]

The "mixing everything standing around" part refered to your handling of the precipitate, you had no idea what it was but you tried to turn it into an explosive. I can assure you, that's not the best way to determine the identity of your substance.

<small>[ February 18, 2003, 03:06 AM: Message edited by: Machiavelli ]</small>

[Anthony]

This may be an odd question, but why do you add KNO3 or NH4NO3 to your HMTD reaction?

[kingspaz]

must be because they too can be explosive thus improving performance of the HMTD :rolleyes:

seriously, IMO that should be avoided because you will have sulphate contaminents in the HMTD which is not good. and also its a fucking waste of chemicals!

[THErAPIST]

I usually add NH4NO3 because then I dont have to use ice or stick my HMTD reaction into the fridge. The KNO3 I don't add anymore. I used to add KNO3 because I read somewhere that it reacted with the hex and made it stronger or some shit. I read this before I ever knew of this forum and I've realized over time that what I had read was pretty much complete crap so I quit with that. I get my NH4NO3 for either free or extremely cheap (which is why most of the charges I set off are AN based). since I get AN so easily I'm never very worried about wasting it. Reguarding the sulfate contamination, I assume this would make the HMTD less stable, and even though I've never had any problems with it even with storage I'll stop using AN.