Structure and Preparation
Sodium azide is an ionic solid. Two crystalline forms are known, rhombohedral and hexagonal. The azide anion is very similar in each, being centrosymmetric with NāN distances of 1.18 Ć . The Na+ ion is pentacoordinated.
The common synthesis method is the "Wislicenus process," which proceeds in two steps from ammonia. In the first step, ammonia is converted to sodium amide:
- 2 Na + 2 NH3 ā 2 NaNH2 + H2
The sodium amide is subsequently combined with nitrous oxide:
- 2 NaNH2 + N2O ā NaN3 + NaOH + NH3
Alternatively the salt can be obtained by the reaction of sodium nitrate with sodium amide.
Read more about this topic: Sodium Azide
Famous quotes containing the words structure and, structure and/or preparation:
“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“I’m a Sunday School teacher, and I’ve always known that the structure of law is founded on the Christian ethic that you shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself—a very high and perfect standard. We all know the fallibility of man, and the contentions in society, as described by Reinhold Niebuhr and many others, don’t permit us to achieve perfection.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)