Hey guys! In my previos video about hypercolic reactions of anhydrous hydrazine
there was the reaction between hydrazine and vanadium oxytrichloride.
In this video I’ll tell you a little bit more about this reagent
and demonstrate the way I synthesized it to capture its reaction with anhydrous hydrazine.
As a matter of fact, the synthesis is pretty simple.
All we need is a single-necked flask filled with vanadium pentoxide.
It’s a quite toxic orange brown powder
that can turn dark-red when heated.
In order to produce vanadium oxytrichloride from it,
we need to boil it in thionyl chloride for a few hours.
Next, we distil the formed yellow liquid that boils at about 120°C
And that’s how we produce pure vanadium oxotrychloride.
It’s an extremely violent reagent and it goes bad fast when stored in a stoppered flask
To be able to store the reagent for a long time
it needs to be transfused into a glass ampoule that must be sealed afterwards.
This way vanadium oxytrichloride can be stored for quite a long time.
So, vanadium oxytrichloride is a yellow liquid that fumes in air with red-orange smoke.
When heated, vanadium oxytrichloride produces a lot of orange smoke as well
On reaction with water
vanadium oxytrichloride produces vanadium pentoxide
which dissolves in water and produces vanadium acid
However, due to the fact that vanadium pentoxide is poorly soluble in water,
later on we can see the reagent forming as a precipitate
A very good way to observe the formation of a vanadium pentoxide precipitate
is the reaction between vanadium oxytrichloride and a diluted alkali solution
In a higher concentration alkali solution, the precipitate dissolves instantly forming potassium orthovanadate
If we drop a zinc granule in a vanadium oxytrichloride solution in hydrochloric acid,
we’ll see the color gradually change from yellow to purple as the oxidation state of vanadium reduces,
which is typical of vanadium compounds
The handbook of reactive chemical hazards says the reaction between vanadium and sodium,
and, therefore, any other alkali metals,
may cause an explosion
To remove the oxide film from a piece of potassium and make it more reactive
I melt it in a test-tube with argon.
While potassium is melting you can see some blue vapors.
Those are potassium vapors
which I talked about in more detail in my video about azides.
Now let’s add a little bit of vanadium oxytrichloride to potassium.
Here I decided to drip vanadium oxytrichloride over burning lithium
since there would be no reaction with regular lithium
And here’s what happens if we soak burning magnesium in vanadium oxytrichloride
Now let’s add vanadium oxytrichloride to a double-necked flask
and then add ozonated oxygen to it through a wide glass tube as vanadium oxytrichloride boils
Some time later
an orange yellow reagent forms in the flask and on its walls.
This is dioxovanadium(V)chloride.
It also forms in the glass tube that we used for an ozonated oxygen flow earlier,
which is why a wider tube must be used,
since a more narrow one would be clogged in no time.
Dioxovanadium (V) chloride is orange red crystals that are very sensitive to the moisture of the air.
They go bad fast turning into brown decavanadic acid.
When heated, dioxovanadium (V) chloride decomposes into vanadium oxytrichloride and vanadium pentoxide
By the way, this excrescence on the tip of the drying tube was formed during the synthesis
It’s red on the outside and gray on the inside.
Its structure is similar to that of brittle rubber.
What do you think could cause the formation of something like this?
Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for watching guys, It was the first video about vanadium compounds on the channel.
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see ya in the next video