Sulfuric acid contains which elements

To dilute the acid, the acid should be added slowly to cold water with constant stirring to limit the buildup of heat. Sulfuric acid reacts with water to form hydrates with distinct properties.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. All rights reserved. See more Encyclopedia articles on: Compounds and Elements.

Frankly, there are few things that can make a writer more vitriolic than a change of conventions. When I was young, sulfur and hence sulfuric acid was always spelt with a PH in the middle rather than an F interestingly, my spell checker kept trying to switch it back to the PH spelling as I typed this , but the international standard has become F, so that's what I must use.

The main point of that opening was to slip in the word 'vitriolic'. It's a word that we use without really thinking about its origins, but there was a time when sulfuric acid was known as oil of vitriol.

Technically, a vitriol itself was a metal sulfate salt, but 'vitriol' was often used as a shorthand for the acid and eventually has come to be applied to a cruel - or acidic - verbal attack.

Mineral vitriols were known in ancient times, while oil of vitriol came into the alchemists' armoury around the thirteenth century. This was the classic example of a substance that was known and used long before it was entirely clear what it was. However by the seventeenth century, sulfuric acid was being produced on a near industrial scale by burning a mixture of sulfur and saltpetre, or potassium nitrate, with steam to provide the hydrogen and extra oxygen to produce the acid.

The result is the familiar formula H 2 SO 4. One of the so-called bench acids, alongside hydrochloric and nitric, sulfuric acid is a very strong mineral acid - strong in the normal English sense because of its intensely corrosive nature, and strong in the chemical sense that it ionises completely in water when it loses its first proton to form a hydronium ion.

Hydronium is the positive H 3 O ion, which forms in water rather than leaving a bare proton floating around. Sulfuric acid is now made from sulfur dioxide in a catalytic process first devised in the s but the outcome is the same - a strong acid that is highly corrosive and that produces a considerable amount of heat when mixed with water.

This is why acid must always be added to water rather than the other way around, to ensure that you don't get a small amount of water in a large amount of sulfuric acid, resulting in flash boiling and spattering with the corrosive fluid. In this heat-producing reaction, the acid and water form sulfate and hydronium ions. Sulfuric acid is excellent at getting hold of water to react in this way.

This is why concentrated sulfuric acid will turn paper black - it is extracting hydrogen and oxygen from the starch in the paper, leaving pure carbon. Similar effects can be produced with other organic compounds - most dramatically with sugar, where an impressive tower of carbon is exuded.

Sulfuric acid has a major industrial role in manufacturing fertilisers and detergents, where it is used to extract phosphate from rocks. It also finds its way into a plethora of industrial processes from removing corrosion from metals to making dyes. Most of us even own some sulfuric acid, though it is locked away where we rarely see it. Car batteries have sulfuric acid at their heart in fact sulfuric is sometimes called battery acid. In the electrolytic reaction that powers the battery, lead and lead oxide electrodes are transformed to lead sulfate, resulting in an electrical charge flowing from plate to plate.

Here on Earth, sulfuric acid tends not to hang around in the natural world. Dilute sulfuric acid neutralises basic oxides or hydroxides to form sulfate salts and water. Don't forget sulfuric acid is a strong acid completely ionizes in water. As sulfuric acid is dibasic ionizes in two stages when it reacts with sodium hydroxide it can form two possible sodium salts.

To see which one is favoured you need to consider the stoichiometry number of moles in the balanced equation for the following two reactions. Dilute sulfuric acid neutralises basic carbonates to form sulfate salts, water and carbon dioxide, resulting in effervescence as shown in the photo, right.

The rate of reaction not only depends on the surface area of the carbonate and the concentration and temperature of the acid, but also on the solubility of the sulfate. When marble CaCO 3 reacts with dilute H 2 SO 4 it initially effervesces but because calcium sulfate is only sparingly soluble in water, once it forms as a deposit on the marble surface, the reaction soon slows.

Dilute sulfuric acid reacts with metals higher than hydrogen in the reactivity series to form sulfate salts and hydrogen gas. Note the metal reactions are different with concentrated sulfuric acid. Iron is cleaned free from rust prior to coating with tin to form tinplate and with zinc to form galvanized iron. Gypsum is CaSO 4. The laxative ' epsom salt ' is MgSO 4. In , Glauber made sulfuric acid by distilling crystals of this salt. Potassium sulfate is unusual in that it crystallizes without water of crystallization and has the formula K 2 SO 4.

As sulfuric acid is dibasic, diprotic it is capable of forming two salts depending on the amount of alkali present in the reaction mixture;. In , solid frozen sulfuric acid was discovered on Jupiter's moon, Europa.

Scientists have even identified solid sulfuric acid hydrates such as hemitriskaidecahydrate H 2 SO 4. Aromatic sulfonation is when an H is replaced by SO 3 H a sulfonic acid group.

In the case of benzene, it needs to be heated with conc. H 2 SO 4 for 8 h to produce benzenesulfonic acid. This reaction is too slow and not to be attempted as benzene is implicated in childhood leukemia. Instead, it's better faster and safer to use toluene methylbenzene , as the methyl CH 3 group is electron releasing and speeds up the reaction.