Making Nitric Acid From Air - Elementalmaker

hey what's going on guys welcome back to the elemental maker today we are working on a cool little project here one that i've been wanting to do for a long long time it is called a birkeland eyed reactor so essentially what this process does is it takes you know common uh common air so what is it like 79 nitrogen 20 oxygen i think maybe a little bit more than 20 percent the remainder being argon which you know we all know is an inert gas and essentially what it does is it combusts the nitrogen so it oxidizes the nitrogen forming no and we do that through a very high temperature arc an electrical arc which then in addition with extra air which you know of course in this vessel joins with more oxygen becoming no2 nitrogen dioxide which we all know is that nasty deadly red gas pretty gnarly stuff but dissolve that in water and over time you will get nitric acid as long as you keep dissolving more and more no2 into the water i don't know exactly how it occurs but it forms no3 nitronium ions and then those you know dissociate into the actual water forming nitric acid i'm not a professional chemist so i probably got some stuff wrong in there please forgive me but this is my apparatus um let me start with the beginning here aquarium pump uh just a cheap one off amazon it's only a four watt and i'm only using the one output um which seems to be actually a pretty decent flow rate i did have to add a little cooling fan here to keep the reactor cool and let me show you the reactor now there goes our pressure so what we have here is just a copper spark gap um you can see i added these coils and that's literally just to allow more time for the heat to dissipate from you know copper is a great conductor i don't want the heat coming down through the base plate and potentially burning the wood i do have some silicone insulators around the copper but it actually seems to do a phenomenal job of dissipating the heat so that's that's great so literally just a nice simple spark gap and the heart of the machine is of course this uh triple checking we are unplugged before i touch it so it is a carlin oil burner transformer 40 volt amp so 40 watts and that pretty much matches what i've measured with my kilowatt meter it seems to float somewhere between 35 and 40 watts when it's under operation now from that assuming you have perfect you know theoretical yield you can calculate how much it should be producing uh per hour and so on and so forth this being a very small scale very very non-perfect reactor set up i i doubt we're making a quarter theoretical yield this is a very very inefficient process so here's the whole system running just without the arc currently going and you can see the gas dispersion tubes so i got lucky on ebay and found uh a new old stock pack of four uh kimball kymax 12c gas dispersion tubes for like 40 bucks pack of four of them so that was a killer deal thank you patrons for supporting those so that'll help maximize efficiency now it's still not going to be perfect but big upgrade one additional upgrade that can be done to these and i'm sure it would help tremendously is the actual ark which uh well it's not even going right now but there's a really really cool system and i'll try to clip another video i found of somebody who made a beautiful version of one of these and essentially you have two magnetic poles on each side and i'm not sure if it's an alter i really couldn't find much data on it but essentially they're using magnets to alter the field that the plasma is contained in and you can essentially make a big disc of plasma which of course all the air going through would have to travel through said plasma disk and that's another way to maximize the amount of no2 generated i have no idea about magnetic fields and arc manipulation that's way out of my realm way above my pay grade but uh if any of you guys know how that works please comment because i would love to do a follow-up video and actually you know try to manipulate the arc i think that would be pretty damn awesome so i'm gonna go get this set up in the garage and run this thing for a couple days see how we do hopefully i don't gas out the garage all right guys so here we are this is run for about 40 hours got a little away from me there um i actually did just test the secondary bubbler and that is uh reasonably acidic looks to be putting down a two or three on the ph scale so curious to see what the primary is actually coming in at now when i disconnected the the connection from the actual reactor i left that outside let the no2 gas off some liquid was in the line that sprayed out at me and burnt the [ __ ] out of my finger so it seems pretty acidic yeah so as you can see that's somewhere 1-0 somewhere in that range damn it appears we made some pretty potent nitric acid here let's test a little bit with some uh some baking soda see how it comes in yeah i mean we definitely got some good acid there holy hell it works i mean it's completely logical to do but if it's your only source of nitric you could totally produce it this way alright so what i want to do at this point is actually neutralize all the acid with baking soda as we uh just did there convert it into sodium nitrate and then see if we can't distill off some red fuming nitric acid see how much we get if i was a better chemist i would titrate it but so there's a strong stuff let's just [ __ ] add baking soda till it's neutral anyone wants some carbonated nitric acid [Music] all right might as well add this to the batch too so the primary bubbler was much much more concentrated than this uh the secondary that's for sure why the sudden color change the hell all right i got no idea why it suddenly turned into piss but uh that's interesting it could be impurities maybe that were carried through some of the hoses some of the tubing i used possible now i need to boil this down all right so this is going to take six years well i turned the camera off a second ago and my god we are bubbling up it's uh kind of rapidly solidifying here all right here we are pretty nicely dried out i'm gonna leave this on here at 200 c for maybe another half hour just to make sure it's all dry but i think we're in pretty damn good shape so let's see how much we actually made here a whopping 22.82 grams of sodium nitrate wow for uh what's that transformer use like 35 40 watts so over the course of two days yeah this has got to be the most inefficient use of electric bill money in the damn world but it's a good bit of fun and i mean hell you can make nitrate salts from electricity that's kind of cool but let's move on and uh distill this stuff into some concentrated nitric acid just gonna add the nitrate salts here i really should not need much sulfuric acid for this at all but i got a feeling i'm gonna pour out way more than i need yeah that's probably way overkill [Applause] i think stoichiometrically i only need like 10 grams oh that's not good so given that rather vigorous reaction when i added the sulfuric to the mix it appears we probably also have some sodium nitrite i mean i was expecting a little bit of nitrogen dioxide on addition but that seemed pretty excessive and vigorous so i think we had some nitrite in there too but we got it on heat now so we'll see what happens pretty neat little visual here you can see the erlenmeyer is actually starting to clear up so it's producing pure nitric vapors at this point and it's just kind of pushing the nitrogen dioxide layer up you can actually see it refluxing a little bit here in this area just wanted to pause real quick for kind of cool visual here you can actually see the nitrogen dioxide is really clearing out of the erlenmeyer and we're getting some refluxing of the nitric acid fumes now also kind of up in here and it's actually pushing the nitrogen dioxide uh phase up and eventually out of here there there always be a little bit of uh nitrogen dioxide hence the red fuming nitric acid part but uh pretty cool to actually be able to see the vapor front moving along uh this kind of re well it's not really a reflux path but a short path here ooh first drop and the camera was out of focus you son of a [ __ ] this damn thing sucks there we go nitric acid this is probably about 95 pure somewhere in that ball park all right just killed heat and uh we don't have much and look at that guys there we go maybe 10 milliliters of nitric acid total i don't think my yield is great here at all but i didn't want to push it too high because i know eventually water contamination can actually start coming over there we go [Music] no video about nitric would be complete without the fuming on air oh well that already kind of proved that didn't it all right let's just show you how she fumes well i don't think i need to demo much more than that but in case you're curious there we go acid fumes well guys i hope you like my uh properly sized cork stand i need to get a smaller one i guess so there you have it how to make nitric acid or nitrate salts from air nitrogen dioxide is some nasty stuff and there is no shortage of it anywhere in this reaction series so uh i don't recommend trying this at home it's totally nuts totally and completely non-cost effective this is probably the most nice or uh most expensive nitric acid you'll ever see but it is a hell of a neat concept to be able to take the nitrogen and oxygen in air plasma burned the [ __ ] out of them just to get some of that nitrogen and oxygen to recombine into nitrogen monoxide which on reaction with more oxygen in the air creates nitrogen dioxide then gets bubbled through water to form nitric acid and i mean what a process now the one kind of caveat here that i was kind of freaked out by is the fact that there were clearly nitrites left in in solution there um i wasn't expecting that when i added the sulfuric acid to the erlenmeyer flask i was not expecting that cloud of nitrogen dioxide that was pretty [ __ ] terrifying luckily i had ventilation set up ran that over to the vent area and all's okay barely got a whiff but uh yeah this stuff is no joke um so do not try this at home well guys thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed please don't forget to thumbs up the video subscribe uh click that little button next to subscribe the little dingleberry bell and uh if you like the channel enough please consider supporting it on patreon help fund more of these videos and i will see you guys next time have a great one so i have uh essentially two gas washing bottles set up so we got about 80 milliliters of water in here the no2 and air mixture will go through here bubble through there and then it gets collected and goes through another one just to try to raise efficiency a little bit i want to see how much nitrate we can actually produce with a uh you know a 24-hour run here so let me plug it in you can see how she works and in pretty short order this whole thing will be filled with nice red gas which is our nitrogen dioxide now i do have to use this cooling fan here to keep the top of this cool because you basically have a 40 watt arc with all that heat going straight up i was hoping there would be enough air flow from the pump through here to actually keep it cooled but that does not seem to be the case now from the exit here i actually have this tube leading to uh an outside but i'm not gonna run this in my basement i just wanted to show the overview of the whole system how it works and then i'm going to move this all out to the garage and let it run for 24 hours i don't want to risk you know if the glass cracks or if something comes loose i don't want to risk pumping my house full of no2 would not be fun so even with that fan running this thing gets pretty freaking warm up here it's only been going for a couple minutes so we've only been in operation here for maybe three or four minutes and you can already see quite a color change of the gas in here lots of nitrogen dioxide already being produced so in theory right now we should be producing nitric acid um not in theory i mean in fact we are producing nitric acid at this moment but it is incredibly inefficient um so it really wouldn't be reasonable to try to make you know much nitric acid with this whole system just the cost of energy and the cost of nitric from an industrial supplier just doesn't add up there are a couple interesting ways to actually boost efficiency one and i got to be careful where i reach here one would be to pack the gas washing bottles with an alkaline solution so whether you had lime water so some calcium hydroxide in there or you know some lye water some sodium hydroxide in there that would definitely increase the absorption of the no2 another option would be to instead of filling this with distilled water you could use hydrogen peroxide which apparently increases yield because it already has that extra oxygen that it's willing to give up so the no2 very easily oxidizes further into no3 that's at least my understanding of it but for this demonstration i'm just using water in both of these if i were to disconnect the output you can definitely smell a faint whiff of no2 coming over so it's not getting fully absorbed by both of these apparently so in industrial settings when they used to use uh the birkeland-eyed process they apparently had 50 foot tall columns of water um and i think six or seven of them to fully absorb as much of the no2 as possible and then after that they had a lime water recovery which would make calcium nitrate which i think is called chilean saltpeter i gotta say though i'm pretty impressed with my setup here it is tighter than a nun's ass this thing i did have to uh to seal the bottom of the wood there was actually enough whoops there was actually enough air diffusing through the wood that i could smell no2 coming through the wood despite having this thing epoxied and sealed six different ways the wood itself wasn't sealed uh so i had to use some uh ultra thin uh starbond ca cyanoacrylate glue and that sealed it up nicely although the no2 does seem to react with the the super glue it kind of discolored it a bit but after i did that the whole system completely sealed i used uh some four silicate glass tubes and some clear epoxy uh of course drilled through the glass with some diamond bits all right guys quick addendum to the video here the aftermath of the generator or the uh the reactor is pretty wild so you can see i used a few different materials in here i use super glue to actually seal the wood to prevent gas from making its way through the wood here i use silicone to seal the electrode joints or electrode pass-throughs um this silicone tubing was originally red so that bleached uh pretty severely but the craziest thing of all is the epoxy i used epoxy to stick this uh sauce container lid to the wood and i mean the epoxy has been completely decimated by either the nitrogen dioxide directly or what i think happened is uh the nitrogen dioxide reacted with moisture in the air to form nitric acid fumes or condensation that then did all this damage same thing on the actual joint where i have the glass tube leaving the jar i drilled a hole through the glass and you can see on the the outside epoxy is fine so it didn't make it all the way through but the epoxy on the inside got pretty torn up and of course we have some you know copper nitrate from from the acid fumes condensing on it but just thought i'd throw that in there clearly this reactor needs a redesign one thing that probably would have prevented this uh damage to the epoxy and you know the copper and whatnot um probably having a gas dryer in line before the reactor to make sure that all the air going into it was fully dry uh from moisture because i think what happened is you know the nitrogen dioxide was reacting with moisture in the air to form nitric acid fumes which then condensed on everything and you know wreaked havoc but uh yeah i'll be sticking away from epoxy in my next design probably trying to stick exclusively to silicone that seemed to hold up best

Channel: ElementalMaker

Views: 90,901

Keywords: Nitric, Making, DIY, Distilling, HNO3, acid, sulfuric, birkeland, eyde

Id: HN6tv7NKtPk

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 23 2022