Synthesis
Zinc-copper couple has been prepared by numerous methods, which vary mainly with respect to the source of copper, but also by the ratio of copper to zinc, the physical state of the zinc (e.g. powder or granules), the use of protic acids and other additives, and temperature of the preparation. Most often the couple is generated and isolated prior to use, but routes have been described to storable forms of the alloy. Most methods involve reduction of an oxidized copper species with zinc, which is used in excess.
An early method for the synthesis of zinc-copper couple entailed treatment of a mixture of zinc dust and copper(II) oxide with hydrogen gas at 500 °C. A more convenient and cheaper method proceeds by treatment of zinc powder with hydrochloric acid and copper(II) sulfate. Treatment of zinc powder with copper(II) acetate monohydrate in hot acetic acid is reportedly highly reproducible. The couple may also be generated in situ by reaction of one equivalent of zinc dust with one equivalent of copper(I) chloride (or copper powder) in refluxing ether.
The choice of method is dictated primarily by the application. The development of newer methods was motivated by the need for zinc-copper couple with reproducible behavior.
Read more about this topic: Zinc-copper Couple
Famous quotes containing the word synthesis:
“The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his breast. He asks himself: “What is he thinking?” and he knows nothing.”
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967)
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)