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Strongest Possible Acid?


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Wow that rocks!! I allways thought it was cool that just regular water given enough time can corrode almost anything. Plus water can counter both acids and bases equally good because it is right between both acis and bases. Is that the PK scale ?? I allready forgot alot from biology.

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Wow that rocks!! I allways thought it was cool that just regular water given enough time can corrode almost anything. Plus water can counter both acids and bases equally good because it is right between both acis and bases. Is that the PK scale ?? I allready forgot alot from biology.

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biology???who tought you about acids and bases in biology? most HS biology is based around darwinism and genes. and HS chemistry introduces you to the PH scale, oxidisers, ionic/covalent bonds, electrons, neutrons, protons, atomic mass, etc...periodic table stuff.

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biology???who tought you about acids and bases in biology? most HS biology is based around darwinism and genes. and HS chemistry introduces you to the PH scale, oxidisers, ionic/covalent bonds, electrons, neutrons, protons, atomic mass, etc...periodic table stuff.

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  • 7 years later...

My favourite acid to use, and one of (if not THE) strongest organic acid is trifluoroacetic acid (TFA). It has a pKa of -0.25 and is 100,000 times stronger than normal acetic acid.

 

http://www.org-chem.org/yuuki/acid/acid_en.html

 

What makes it so amazing is that it is quite volatile with a boiling point of around 72 C, such that it can be used to digest polysaccharides or proteins into their respective sugar and amino acid units, respectively, and then it can be evapourated off quite easily with a simple nitrogen stream.

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Antimony fluorine acid and it has a pH of negative 25, I think its called fluoroantimonic acid. I think it's the current confirmed record holder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoroantimonic_acid

 

 

, and before that I think its carborane acid with a pH of negative 21.

 

As was discussed back in January.

Jan 2004 that is.

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  • 3 weeks later...

The "strength" of an acid or alkali is measured by the PH scale (potential hydrogen) Lowest PH="strongest acid"...any other criteria is just mental gear grinding LOL. Some of these super-acids sound like great oxidizers for rocket fuel if they didn't eat the delivery system, the rocket,the pad, and the ground!

P.S. The reason I logged on is because I am in search of a powerful, obtainable, environmentally friendly oxidizer for...You guessed it, rocket fuel! Not for bombs or dumshit...I want to be the first INDIVIDUAL to lob a transponder into L.O.E. I'll let it burn up after 1 orbit so we don't have more space junk, but I think that would be enough to wake up NASA and the government(s)! I Realize this off the subject, so I'll start a new thread under rockets and get off here. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Edited by rocketfan
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Sorry for the necromancy bump from 2004. Oops! Did not really look at the dates. I was just browsing through the site and this thread caught my interest.

Don't worry too much, it may have been necromancy, but at least it was accurate. That put's it one up on rocketfan's post.

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  • 2 months later...

Well, let's answer the basic question first. H+ ions (meaning, I think, H3O+ ions) - would a beaker of them be that acidic? It looks to me like the maths breaks down here - [H3O+]=Kw/[OH-], and if there isn't a single OH- ion, our H3O+ concentration will be infinite, which obviously doesn't work. I don't know what the properties will be like. Maybe someone else can clarify?

 

As for the "strongest acid" question, a good scale to use would be the pKa scale, by which the strongest acid is fluoroantimonic acid (HF-SbF5), basically a H+ ion loosely attracted to one of 6 F- atoms held in covalent single bonds with an antimony atom). This is a superacid that far exceeds any other, with a pKa of -25. HClO4 (the strongest typical acid) has a pKa of only -8 and sulphuric acid has one of -3.3. This means that fluoroantimonic acid is basically 10^21 times stronger than H2SO4 (I'm not even joking).

 

For some pH examples, 1M of H2SO4 has a pH of 0; 1M of HClO4 has a pH of 3.24*10-9; and 1M of HF-SbF5 has a pH of below -20.

 

 

And the pH scale is logarithmic. :P

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