purifying barium sulfate

[willowchar]

Wondering if there is a process to purify barium sulfate. I have access to 1000 gm that has a slight amber hue to it. It dose not perform well in strobe propellant. I switched it with synthesized barium sulfate (white) in the same comp and everything worked fine.

The product was purchased from a pigment supplier. I suspect it is of the mineral type accompanied with some sort of impurities?

I believe there must be an easy way to purify it rather going through the laborious route to synthesize it.

 

Thanks

[justvisiting]

I have synthesized my own barium sulfate and used it in strobe rockets. I'm no chemist, but I think making your own barium sulfate would be easier than trying to purify your product, because your product will have to be dissolved in acid first, in order to purify it. I used crappy barium chlorate I bought, and reacted it with epsom salts (magnesium sulfate heptahydrate). You could use barium nitrate and magnesium sulfate to make barium sulfate reasonably cheaply. I settled, decanted, repeated, until the magnesium salt was gone, and dried the resulting product. It was really difficult to get it to give up the water it held onto, which still baffles me. Next time I make it I am going to dry the barium sulfate slurry on a plaster of paris slab.

[Mumbles]

One thought is to wash your barium sulfate with a dilute acid. Something like HCl or Acetic acid maybe. Effectively you want to see if you can wash away the impurities. This is kind of opposed to the normal method of purifying the product out of the impure mixture. You "purify" the less desirable things out of the impure mixture. Ceramic grade barium sulfate often has some extra things in it, as you mentioned, from the mineral source. This most often is barium carbonate and barium sulfide. You'll want to do this outdoors. Barium sulfide will make hydrogen sulfide which is both toxic and smells really bad. Those things will hopefully be turned into a soluble barium compound with the use of HCl or acetic acid, and will wash away. You'd want to follow up with some distilled water washes to remove all of it and anything else that might wash away. This mixture is going to contain soluble barium salts (hopefully) and will be hazardous. I'd suggest adding magnesium sulfate or something to it to precipitate it back out as barium sulfate, which can be reisolated. That's just an added bonus in this method.

 

I'm not saying this is going to work, but it's at least a starting point.

[WSM]

Wondering if there is a process to purify barium sulfate. I have access to 1000 gm that has a slight amber hue to it. It dose not perform well in strobe propellant. I switched it with synthesized barium sulfate (white) in the same comp and everything worked fine.

The product was purchased from a pigment supplier. I suspect it is of the mineral type accompanied with some sort of impurities?

I believe there must be an easy way to purify it rather going through the laborious route to synthesize it.

Thanks

 

 

The product you bought sounds familiar. I believe what you have is called barytes, and is a powdered natural ore of barium. It's principally barium sulfate but typically contaminated with other minerals.

 

"The most common gangue (contaminating) minerals are quartz or other forms of silica (chert, drusy quartz, and jasperoid), sulfide minerals (galena, marcasite, pyrite, and sphalerite), clay minerals, carbonates (calcite and siderite), and iron oxides. Organic matter can also be present at concentrations up to several weight percent."

 

I believe Mumbles has offered good "starting point" suggestions if you intend to try purifying the material you purchased. Otherwise, you may want to find other uses for it and purchase purer forms of barium sulfate to use in pyrotechnics.

 

Good luck.

 

WSM

[pyrojig]

With the price you could fetch with selling the barrium chlorate, you could buy 4x as much sulfate.

[justvisiting]

I used barium chlorate because it was crappy. It did not produce a good green, even after re-crystallizing. If I didn't have a useless but soluble barium salt to start with, I'd have used barium nitrate and epsom salt. Both are cheap enough, and readily available.

[ronmoper76]

Wondering if there is a process to purify barium sulfate. I have access to 1000 gm that has a slight amber hue to it. It dose not perform well in strobe propellant. I switched it with synthesized barium sulfate (white) in the same comp and everything worked fine.

The product was purchased from a pigment supplier. I suspect it is of the mineral type accompanied with some sort of impurities?

I believe there must be an easy way to purify it rather going through the laborious route to synthesize it.

 

Thanks

Is pure barium sulfate supposed to be white?? I have quite a bit i purchased a while back and it's definitely not white,i'm curious if its crap like i suspected. It's a darker color,i wish i knew what but i'm colorblind..

[SharkWhisperer]

Is pure barium sulfate supposed to be white?? I have quite a bit i purchased a while back and it's definitely not white,i'm curious if its crap like i suspected. It's a darker color,i wish i knew what but i'm colorblind..

White crystals. C'mon dude, you can easily locate this information yourself. There's several types of colorblindness, and none should affect your ability to discriminate white from non-white.

 

You bought impure barium sulfate.

 

Suggest familiarizing yourself with PubChem : https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

[ronmoper76]

White crystals. C'mon dude, you can easily locate this information yourself. There's several types of colorblindness, and none should affect your ability to discriminate white from non-white.

 

You bought impure barium sulfate.

 

Suggest familiarizing yourself with PubChem : https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

I bought it from your favorite rip off pyro supply shop SKYLIGHTER. I already hated their prices,now i realize that they are selling bullshit chemicals. twice they got me, i had a whole bag of titanium spilled in my fucking box to.

[ronmoper76]

White crystals. C'mon dude, you can easily locate this information yourself. There's several types of colorblindness, and none should affect your ability to discriminate white from non-white.

 

You bought impure barium sulfate.

 

Suggest familiarizing yourself with PubChem : https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

take it how you want it,i see about 4 or 5 shades,my brother,i and grandfather all have it. grass is red to me,pink is red,greens and browns and grays all look the same.,red and orange look the same but its not your red or orange,my grandfather is even worse My wife does all color identifications for me always has,white can have a red or orange tint to it and i would never see it,she has called me on it a hundred times..she always checks my nitrocellulose monthly to make sure it isn't degrading,because i cant see it. You have no fucking idea how hard my life has been living my life like this,I was a power lineman for 15 years and i still did my fucking job as a electrical worker. I see my own form of colors and there not like yours,don't even bother trying to wrap your head around that because you don't have the eyes i was born with FUCKBOY!!

[justvisiting]

I use my nose for nitrocellulose, not my eyes. Natural barium sulfate (barytes) is off-white to orange or pink. Since it is known that oxidized magnalium and impure barium sulfate are the two main reasons for strobe rockets with weak/absent pops, it follows that natural minerals (like many pottery chemicals) would be a poor choice.

 

The barium sulfate I bought from Skylighter over a decade ago was pure white and worked for strobe fuel.

 

The pharmaceutical grade was pure white and worked well.

 

My home-made salvage job barium sulfate worked well.

 

Anybody that can make fireworks can make barium sulfate cheaply and easily.

 

The good thing for newer pyros is that lots of us have reported on our problems, helped each other diagnose them, and made a permanent record here, so nobody has to make our mistakes again. I learn more by reading about stuff than by asking questions, usually. My questions have usually already been asked- and answered I bet there's over a hundred pages of back and forth, just on strobe rockets.

[ronmoper76]

I use my nose for nitrocellulose, not my eyes. Natural barium sulfate (barytes) is off-white to orange or pink. Since it is known that oxidized magnalium and impure barium sulfate are the two main reasons for strobe rockets with weak/absent pops, it follows that natural minerals (like many pottery chemicals) would be a poor choice.

 

The barium sulfate I bought from Skylighter over a decade ago was pure white and worked for strobe fuel.

 

The pharmaceutical grade was pure white and worked well.

 

My home-made salvage job barium sulfate worked well.

 

Anybody that can make fireworks can make barium sulfate cheaply and easily.

 

The good thing for newer pyros is that lots of us have reported on our problems, helped each other diagnose them, and made a permanent record here, so nobody has to make our mistakes again. I learn more by reading about stuff than by asking questions, usually. My questions have usually already been asked- and answered I bet there's over a hundred pages of back and forth, just on strobe rockets.

as cheap as barium sulfate is i'm gonna just discard what i have and order somewhere else.. I had a bad problem with detonation in that particular strobe mix as well,and i haven't fooled with it since. mine looks almost a tan color and i never suspected an issue till i looked it up at another supplier and saw there product looked a lot different in the picture... I just assumed since skylighter sold it to me and i paid more than anywhere else it was correct. It was all jacked up to..had hard chunks all through it and random dirt specs i think?? i screened it as best i could,milled it 24 hours and bagged it never thinking i might have a big bag of bullshit. You would think if it was sold as part of a strobe kit ,you wouldn't need to bother with testing your chemicals

Edited March 19, 2021 by ronmoper76

[SharkWhisperer]

as cheap as barium sulfate is i'm gonna just discard what i have and order somewhere else.. I had a bad problem with detonation in that particular strobe mix as well,and i haven't fooled with it since. mine looks almost a tan color and i never suspected an issue till i looked it up at another supplier and saw there product looked a lot different in the picture... I just assumed since skylighter sold it to me and i paid more than anywhere else it was correct. It was all jacked up to..had hard chunks all through it and random dirt specs i think?? i screened it as best i could,milled it 24 hours and bagged it never thinking i might have a big bag of bullshit. You would think if it was sold as part of a strobe kit ,you wouldn't need to bother with testing your chemicals

Well, you could probably purify it to a useful extent if you had the motivation just with washing, but at $4/pound, I don't think I'd ever bother. Try Chris's stuff at FWC. Solid dude. Solid chems. Good pricing. Skylighter? Meh. Not in this lifetime at those prices, and their BP "kits" are an embarrassment for them, no matter who the current owner--business repairs are in order perhaps.

 

You use your nose to gauge NC degradation status? hah ha! Yeah, you can probably smell that. Ask your girl what color it is and if fumes are coming off of it. Or, just add a cheap stabilizer and not worry so much about it, if deacidified and stored properly.

 

Besides the novelty of flashpaper/string/cotton, just don't appreciate the need to manufacture NC for pyro purposes--especially for lacquer. Poor QC, difficult to estimate nitration, washing takes 5x longer than nitration, and chem costs don't give any real savings over smokeless... To each their own.

[Twesla]

I havent been able to find smokeless gunpowder anywhere, which is why I make it at home. But Ive been dicking around with nitrocellulose even before I started making my own fireworks, so its much less of a hassle for me now. Kleen Out drain cleaner is a surprisingly great source of sulfuric acid that can be used to both distill dry nitric acid and run the nitration.

 

Anywho, Im really happy I cam across this thread because I have some really pure barium sulfate I made at home as well as a lb that I just got from pyrochemsource. My homemade stuff is pure white whereas the purchased stuff is slightly off white, and the latest rocket I made with the purchased material was more muffled.

 

I wanted to add that I made some strobe fuel without potassium dichromate and that also had muffled sounding strobes along with a bright green flame. I then added the dichromate to the same fuel and the next rocket was like a helicopter and it had a bright white flame.