Making Sulfuric Acid using the Chamber Process

[Music] hi everyone welcome back to Cody's lab so today I'm going to attempt to make sulfuric acid using the chamber process now Mike amber today is this glass cylinder historically this would have been a lead-lined wooden box the size of a cathedral but I'm just doing a small scale test today I'll probably scale up at some point but the reaction that's going on here overall looks like this water is reacting with sulphur dioxide and oxygen gas to form sulfuric acid the sulfur dioxide one of the gases that I'll be starting with dissolves into the water making sulfurous acid which breaks down as acids do in solution this sulfurous acid must be oxidized in order to form sulfuric acid though and regular atmospheric oxygen just won't do it on its own so you need a catalyst and for this catalyst I'm gonna be using nitric acid so the nitrate reacts with the so3 to minus and solution forming sulfate and nitrogen monoxide gas so nitrogen monoxide goes into the chamber and reacts with the oxygen gas forming nitrogen dioxide which further reacts with water forming nitric acid it's good that I'm able to use this as a catalyst because I don't have very much nitric acid left of course I can make more but it's a lot of work so let's pour out looks like about three to five milliliters so not very much do this let's add about a hundred milliliters of water so let's just pour this into the chamber just like that now I do have this whole thing on a hot plate I'm not gonna be heating it I'm just using this so that I can stir this up and agitate the water so it'll react faster now the chamber is full of air currently that is not a huge problem but there's a little bit of annoying because the nitrogen is taking up a lot of volume factor you know it's only about 20 percent oxygen in there right now the nitrogen isn't going to do anything for this reaction so make things a little bit easier on me I'm going to suck out all of that air so that I can replace it with pure oxygen [Music] your air pressure right now is just over 25 inches of mercury the gauge here is reading almost 25 I would expect it to not be a full vacuum because there's much water and stuff in there it's time to replace the atmosphere with my own mixture for that I'm gonna use a pair of gas generators here this one will be making sulfur dioxide and this one will be making oxygen gas I've got hydrogen peroxide here and a catalyst which will break it down into oxygen and over here I've got some ironically sulfuric acid which I'm going to be adding to sodium metabisulfite and once the gas is formed it'll go up here through a filter which will take out the water vapor as well as any particulates and that gas now cleaned is gonna go up this glass tube and into the chamber so in our overall reaction we have two sulfur dioxide for one oxygen now these are by moles and a mole of gas is the same volume as another mole so we're gonna have to to one by volume and volume does correspond to pressure so I'm going to take the pressure which is currently at negative 600 to tour 24 inches of mercury - I'm going to add a hundred and thirty of oxygen and then about 260 of sulphur dioxide so I end up with a negative 200 towards alright time to add in the gases I'm gonna start with oxygen so let's put in a little bit of the proc side onto the catalyst it's probably a very vigorous reaction considering that this is happening under reduced pressure is they gonna foil over it is isn't it that's it the filters for yeah filters doing this job it's keeping that mega nice dioxide out of there okay it's about the right amount of oxygen in I ended up actually taking the separating funnel out of there so that I could relieve the pressure reaction was continuing a little bit more than I would like so now we're gonna put in the sulphur dioxide great looks like it's working looks like I've overshot my target pressure a little bit reactions continuing but that's alright a little bit excess from the so2 let's turn on the stirrer let's get this water mixed up and start making the acid at six o'clock this run for a couple of hours maybe see how it does since I had an excess of sulfur dioxide I decided to put some more oxygen in and bring it up to normal spirit pressure of course overshot on the amount of peroxide so I've had to release it unfortunately I was able to shut it off right here and just up the air assuming there's no leaks this should actually pull vacuum as the gases react and form the sulfuric acid it is pulling a vacuum no it's working so there we are it's been just after one hour yeah pick up a piece of white paper here you can see that the chamber is slightly Brown especially up near the top there another update is I have turned on this hot plate and I'm just very low it is near freezing in here so I figure a little bit of heating probably wouldn't hurt as long as I can hold my hand on there it's probably not too hot just don't want to break the glass this pressure gauge seems to be stuck at about one inch of mercury you see here yeah my guess is that either reactions not working or air is leaking in at about the same rate as the other gases are consumed if that's the case it is gonna be kind of hard to tell when this is done so I'm just gonna give it another hour and then whatever it's got then I think because what we've made so I actually let it go to about 8:30 let's shut it down this off I smell a little bit of sulfur dioxides it use up all of it but it's weak enough that I think it must be used most of it I'm gonna shake this around get all that off the walls of the chamber okay let's set up let's boil out the water and concentrate the acid okay let's pour our crude acid into the distillation apparatus yeah throw the stir bar in there with it that's fine there we go distillation has started the water is coming over and the nitric acid should be coming along with it all right I think most of the water has been boiled out let's pull it off there see we got [Applause] [Music] [Applause] there we go okay so now let's pour this out into a little beaker here see how much concentrated acid we got oh look at those fumes turn off my fan let's see how much we got here it's like right around 20 milliliters not very much certainly less than the amounts that I used to produce the sulfur dioxide but that's not the point the point is that I was able to take the sulfur dioxide and convert it into the acid I could produce the sulfur dioxide by burning sulfur for instance yeah that does look like more than I would expect just from reacting the sulfur dioxide with nitric acid alone so it definitely had a catalytic effect I'm sure if I had a bigger chamber I could have made a lot more I'd say this is a success let's uh pour this into some sugar let's say feel dehydrated I would say that's dehydration neat didn't really oh it's good all right hope you enjoyed I'll see you next time it's actually the best-smelling thing I've made all day

Channel: Cody'sLab

Views: 343,647

Rating: 4.9548526 out of 5

Keywords: chemistry, glassware, gas, sulfur dioxide, nitric acid, oxygen, catalist, H2SO4

Id: 7SDHeTcOXtI

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Using sulfuric acid to make sulfuric acid from scratch without it seeming like a shortcut is something only Cody could pull off.

[u/usrnamealreadytakn]

Great video, nice to see that Cody is getting some actual lab equipment now. Hope he get that fume hood though, I think it's starting to be a priority.