Home > Community > If nitric acid and sulfamic acid makes nitrous oxide and sulfuric acid (according to wikipedia), does that mean that potassium nitrate and sulfamic acid would make nitrous oxide and sodium bisulfate?
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Milton Steinberg

If nitric acid and sulfamic acid makes nitrous oxide and sulfuric acid (according to wikipedia), does that mean that potassium nitrate and sulfamic acid would make nitrous oxide and sodium bisulfate?

Ayesha Qurat ul Ain  Follow

No, this probably wouldn’t work. See

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ic50190a080

for a discussion of mechanism. It looks like you need a NO2+ ion, that is, the nitric acid needs to be protonated. The paper mentions that starting with some sulfuric acid helps, but some small amount of initial self-protonation with the resulting sulfuric acid production allows for the reaction to proceed even without this - so long as the nitric acid is very concentrated.
But in your proposed reaction, the solution would likely never become acidic enough for this to happen at an appreciable rate. Yes, it would be acidic (maybe near pH 0 or something), but NO2+ requires *serious* acidity, like ‘there is no H2O here any more, it’s just us protons now’.

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Amelia Noah  Follow

No.

Look at your question: you’d have to convert potassium to sodium. That’s transmutation, which doesn’t work with chemical reactions.

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