Potassium Chlorate Matches

[6squirrels]

So I was devising a way to get the KClO3 out of a match head, and I looked up the average contents of a match head. I got some decent results, 45-55% KClO3, 20-40% sand filler, and a touch of starch, binder, sulfur, and glue. First off, I was surprised to see that sulfur was in a product with a chlorate. But anyway, I figured that most of these ingredients are insoluble in water, so I just threw the powdered match heads in a hot water solution to see what happens. After a while, the solution turned a vivid green from the dye in the powder. There was some insoluble material at the bottom of the glass, and some suspended, so I shook it a little. The little bit of white foam on the top was going in the opposite direction of the particles still in the rest of the mix, and upon further inspection I saw that there was a thin film of some clear liquid on top. I stirred it kind of a lot, and when the motion settled, the film reestablished itself. The film had not absorbed the dye, and I'm curious if anyone has ideas on what could be happening here. I can see a lot of the insolubles built up in the bottom now, and there are no floating chunks anywhere in the solution other than sitting on the bottom.

 

PS I realize that this is probably a very inefficient way of getting KClO3, but I just thought it might be cool to try. I'm always up for an experiment

[Potassiumchlorate]

The famous Swedish matches don't contain any sulfur since over 150 years ago, but that is not due to incompability issues but due to the smell. It's actually not proven that really pure sulfur and really pure potassium chlorate will react with each other spontaneously. It's not standard to mix them in anything but matches, though, since the smallest impurities might make them react with each other.

 

It's a pretty inefficient source, yes, but experimenting is always funny.

[Mumbles]

As unpleasant as the odor of burning sulfur may be, it pales in comparison to burning animal glue.

[6squirrels]

are you kidding? I love the smell of burning sulfur! never smelled burning animal glue though, but i can imagine xp... bleh

[Potassiumchlorate]

I don't mind the smell of sulfur either, but they removed it from the matches because of that.

 

Unfortunately they also removed the manganese dioxide some years ago, so the matches are harder to light than they used to be.

[Matchless]

With regards to the film you saw on the water it could be from whatever burn catalyst that was used in the matchstick itself. I believe they use wax or paraffin or steric acid in the "top" half of the match to make the wood burn better. Some of the wax might have come off with the match heads and made a little slick on your warm water. The "bottom" of the matchstick is impregnated with ammonium phosphate (fire-retardant) so if you light a match and hold it upright it burns well till about halfway and then often extinguishes itself because of the fire-retardant in the bottom half.

[Swede]

Your water (preferably hot) is going to dissolve the chlorate, along with potentially some "binder", if it's water soluble, and perhaps some dye. Sulfur and sand will remain undissolved. If you filter your solution and allow the water to evaporate, you'll probably get tinted potassium chlorate.

 

If you want to be ambitious, put your filtered water in a separatory funnel, toss in a non-polar solvent like hexane or ether, shake it up a bit, and allow the layers to separate. The solvent should pull out waxes or waxy solids, binders that would preferably dissolve in a non-polar solution, and hopefully the dye. The water layer would then contain mostly potassium chlorate.

 

Evaporate off, and recrystallize once or twice, and my guess is it'd be decently pure. It'd be a lot of work, but stuff like that can be interesting and fun.