Mercury Azides. I'll Get Right On Those For You.

Azides have featured several times in the Things I Won't Work With series, starting with simple little things like, say, fluorine azide and going up to all kinds of ridiculous, gibbering, nitrogen-stuffed detonation bait. But for simplicity, it's hard to beat a good old metal azide compound, although if you're foolhardy enough to actually beat one of them it'll simply blow you up.

There's a new paper in Angewandte Chemie that illustrates this point in great detail. It provides the world with the preparation of all kinds of mercury azides, and any decent chemist will be wincing already. In general, the bigger and fluffier the metal counterions, the worse off you are with the explosive salts (perchlorates, fulminates, and the others in the sweaty-eyebrows category). Lithium perchlorate, for example, is no particular problem. Sodium azide can be scooped out with a spatula. Something like copper perchlorate, though, would be cause for grave concern, and a pharse like "mercury azide" is the last thing you want to hear, and it just might be the last thing you do.

As fate would have it, though, none of this chemistry is simple. You can get several crystalline forms of mercuric azide, for one thing. The paper tells you how to make small crystals of the alpha form, which is not too bad, as long as you keep it moist and in the dark, and never, ever, do anything with it. You can make larger crystals, too, by a different procedure, but heed the authors when they say: "This procedure i...

Source: In the Pipeline - August 28, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Things I Won ' t Work With Source Type: blogs