Question

% of Heo in Green Vitriol​

Answer 1

Answer:

WHAT IS A VITRIOL?

Simply put, a vitriol is a metallic sulfate compound, often but not always hydrated. The crystals of most vitriols are glassy and all are soluble in water, making solutions containing sulfuric acid. In fact, the very word vitriol has its origin in the Latin word for glass, vitrum.

Out of the ten or so vitriol compounds, one is common and occurs along faults and oxidized zones in metallic mineral deposits: green vitriol, better known to geologists and miners as the mineral melanterite, or to chemists as iron sulfate heptahydrate, FeSO4·7H2O. Pure green vitriol is a transparent pale green solid. Not surprisingly, it has a glassy luster just like broken glass.

Green Vitriol

On the surface of the earth, green vitriol that is most common form of vitriol. As the mineral melanterite, you can find it at most iron, zinc, lead, copper and other metallic mineral deposits. These mineral deposits bearing melanterite will all have the following properties in common: iron, sulfur in some form and lots of oxidation. You need all three to make melanterite.

Find a fault in a mine or find a place where there is water seepage in or next to a metallic mineral mine and that’s where you’ll probably find melanterite. Why? Well, for three reasons.

The first is the presence of the common sulfide minerals which occur in many mineral deposits. Pyrite, also known as iron sulfide, FeS2, or as fool’s gold, is a good example of a common sulfide mineral. Sulfide minerals provide green vitriol with the sulfur it needs to form.

The second reason is water, which prefers to travel along joints, fractures and faults in rocks. The thing about water is that it is rich in oxygen and lots of oxygen is required for the iron and sulfur in rocks to be oxidized.

The third reason is the abundance of iron. Iron is everywhere waiting to be oxidized. Iron is the fourth most-abundant element in the earth’s crust. The abundance of iron is the reason that most metallic mineral deposits have a cap or “gossan” of oxidized-iron minerals in the form of limonite, a rust-colored melange of various oxidized iron compounds. You can often find melanterite in gossans if the climate isn’t too dry. You can also find melanterite in streams with acid mine drainage or on tailings piles rich in limonite or along seeps and faults inside, on top of, or next to old mines.

Another name for green vitriol and one that all of nineteenth or earlier English-speaking ancestors would have known was copperas. Along with alum, copperas was one of the essential raw materials of the pre-industrial world.

The Uses of Green Vitriol

Green vitriol – or copperas, if you prefer – was formerly used for all sorts of things and is still used today. In the Middle Ages, it was the starting material to make early formulations of sulfuric acid. It should not be a surprise that the old pre-industrial name for sulfuric acid was oil of vitriol.

Green vitriol was also used as a leather dye commonly sold as shoemaker’s black. In addition, it was utilized as a mordant to fix dyes for the coloring raw cloth – and it retains that use to this day. It was an ingredient in several black ink recipes from antiquity to the early twentieth century. In leather dye and in oak gall ink, the soluble iron from the green vitriol would react with the tannic and gallic acids in the leather or proto-ink solution, respectively, to form iron tannate and iron gallate, both of which are black.

Modern uses of this chemical compound include as a supplement for treating anemia, as a preventative medicine for constipation, as a water treatment to prevent eutrophication, as a fertilizer and lawn conditioner (often bagged and sold as copperas), and as a reducing agent in environmental remediation to reduce chromium VI to less toxic forms. Because of its ready solubility and its power as a reducing agent, it is widely used in many industrial processes.

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