Sodium Hexametaphosphate

Sodium hexametaphosphate is a kind of sodium metaphosphate polymers. It is also known as "polyvinylidene sodium," "sodium multiple metaphosphate", "sodium metaphosphate vitreous body", and "Graham salt". It is a colorless transparent glass-like solid or white powder with greater solubility but low dissolving rate in water. Its aqueous solution exhibits acidic property. Its complex of divalent metal ion is relatively more stable than the complexes of mono-valent metal ion. It can easily be hydrolyzed to orthophosphate in warm water, acid or alkali solution. Hexametaphosphate has a relative strong hygroscopicity with being sticky after absorbing moisture. For certain metal ions (e.g., calcium, magnesium, etc.), it has the ability to form soluble complexes, and thus being able to being used for demineralizing water. It can also from precipitate with lead and silver ions with precipitate being re-dissolved in excess amount of sodium hexametaphosphate solution to form a complex salt. Its barium salt can also form complexes with the sodium hexametaphosphate. It can be used as a kind of highly efficient water softener of power stations, rolling stock boiler water; as detergent additive, as corrosion-controlling or anti-corrosion agents; as cement hardening accelerator; as streptomycin purification agent, and the cleaning agent of textile industry and dyeing industry. It can also be used as a kind of sedative drug, preservative, stabilizer, and fruit juice precipitant in food industry. In the oil industry, it is used for control of drilling pipe rust and adjusting the viscosity of oil drilling mud. It also has applications in fabric dyeing, tanning, paper, color film, soil analysis, radiation chemistry and analytical chemistry and other departments. Our GB2760-1996 provisions that hexametaphosphate is allowable food additives (water retention agent) for being used for canned food, fruit juice drinks, dairy products, soy products; it can also be used as a dye dispersant, and water treatment agent.

It can be used as a food quality improver in food industry, pH adjusting agent, metal ion chelating agents, dispersants, extenders, etc.  It can be used as a kind of common analytical reagents, water softener, and also used for photofinishing and printing. It can be used as a water softener, detergent, preservative, cement hardening accelerator, fiber dyeing and cleaning agents; it can also used for medicine, food, petroleum, printing and dyeing, tanning, and paper industry. It can be used as texturizing agent; emulsifiers; stabilizer; chelating agent. It is less frequently for being used alone and is generally used in mixture with pyrophosphate and metaphosphate. The mixture is mainly used for ham, sausage, surimi such as the tissue improver for water retention, tendering and meat softening. It can also be used for prevention of crystallization of canned crab as well as dissolving agent of pectin. It can be used as the water softening agent of boiler water and industrial water (including water for the production of dyes, water for the production of titanium dioxide, water for printing and dyeing, and slurry mixing, water for cleaning color copy of the film, as well as chemical industrial water and the water for the medicines, reagents production, etc.) as well as the water treatment agent for the industrial cooling water; it can also be used as a corrosion inhibitor, flotation agent, dispersant agent, high temperature binding agent, dyeing auxiliaries, metal surface treatment, rust inhibitors, detergent additives and also cement hardening accelerator. Coated paper production can use it as pulp dispersants in order to improve the penetration capability. In addition, it can also be apply to the washing utensils and chemical fiber in order to remove iron ions of the pulp. In the oil industry, it can be used for the antirust of the drilling pipe and adjusting the slurry viscosity upon the control of oil drilling. It can be used as the quality improver with various effects of increasing the complex metal ions of food.