The Home Scientist 017 - Synthesize Nitrocellulose (Guncotton)

• published: 15 Feb 2010
• views: 37448

Dr. Paul Jones synthesizes nitrocellulose from cotton balls and a mixture of concentrated sulfuric and nitric acids. In the video, we talk about nitrating for 2 minutes, but as you'll see watching the video, we actually nitrated different cotton balls for different times, with a minimum of two minutes and maximum of about 4 or 5 minutes. Those nitrated for 4 or 5 minutes were considerably more energetic and faster burning than those nitrated for only two minutes, so if you reproduce this experiment you may wish to nitrate the cotton balls for 4 or 5 minutes and then drench them by dumping them all at once into a large container of water for the first rinse rather than following the procedure Paul used in the video. Be extremely careful with this procedure. The concentrated acids are extremely corrosive. The nitration process itself produces *extremely toxic* nitrogen oxides (visible as the organish vapors in the video), so do this outside or under an exhaust hood, particularly if you scale up the experiment. The nitrocellulose product is extremely flammable, and if highly nitrated may detonate rather than simply burning. If you live near a city or large town, you may be able to purchase concentrated nitric acid locally. If not, elementalscientific.net is one good source. They sell one pint (473 mL) bottles of 70% ACS reagent grade nitric acid for $9.99. There's a $20 hazardous shipping surcharge, but IIRC you can order up to 8 bottles for one surcharge.