Quote:
Originally Posted by julianh72
Errr .... no! There's no nitrates in copper sulphate, so it can't make nitric acid. (Nitric acid passivates aluminium, so I wouldn't have thought it was ideal for stripping aluminium from glass.) Sulphuric acid perhaps, but the hydrochloric acid should do the job anyway, I would have thought.
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My bad....I loved chemistry at school but was never good at formulas for reactions. Caustic soda can remove the aluminium coating but nitric acid is used to disolve silver from a silver coated mirror. A really stong acid is needed to remove the protective overcoat put on commercially manufactured mirrors. I surprised myself that I was able to make a usable coating for the mirror through improvising chemical sources, due to the unavailability of quality chemicals.
"Chemically, nitric acid is made by bubbling nitrogen dioxide into water. So the objective in this approach is to generate nitrogen dioxide. This can be done by reacting hydrochloric acid, a nitrate salt and copper. Around 80grams of sodium nitrate, over 30 grams of copper and 100mL of hydrochloric acid are the quantities needed. The exact amount is not critical. For useable concentrations, the amount of water being converted should be small, around 20-50mL."