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Topic: Would lithium bronze in non polar solutions react with aluminium and other metal  (Read 2736 times)

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Offline CrimpJiggler

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Would lithium bronze dissolved in a non polar solvent (i.e. hexane, toluene, cyclohexane, highly non polars) react with with solid metals like aluminium, copper, iron etc.?

I saw this thread:
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=13161
and had no idea what I was looking at, so I had to look into this mystery, I'm still very confused, and completely fascinated by this lithium bronze thing. I see its used to make lithium amide, and reduce double bonds, this kinda reduction is a named reaction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_reduction
Looking into the mechanism, lithium or sodium dissolves in liquid ammonia to make an electride salt. What has me really confused is how this electride salt works as a reducing agent in non polar solvents. And the liquid ammonia part, you'd need really low temperatures but in that thread he demonstrates it occur at room temperature (normal pressure too).

I have a million things going through my head, but I'll keep them for other threads. Right now I'm wondering if it corrodes aluminium? NaOH corrodes aluminium violently but thats only if water is present. Would lithium bronze react with aluminium too? If so, what product would that form?

I read about this lithium ammonium electride salt here:
https://www.revolvy.com/topic/Birch%20reduction&item_type=topic
and its said to have a deep blue colour. Am I reading about something else? Is it bronze or blue? Also if you used pressure to condense the ammonia instead of low temperatures, would that result in a dangerously violent reactive reducing agent?

EDIT: I found out that the deep blue compound is not the same thing as lithium bronze, the blue solution is formed when Li is dissolved in liquid ammonia. The solvated Li forms an electride salt: [Na(NH)]+e
which has a blue colour.

Lithium bronze on the other hand is [Na(NH)]4

I really like the idea of being able to synthesise your own lithium amide with this reagent. And am fascinated by what else you can do with it. Also wondering if there are any other gases which form these kinds of complexes. Phosphene for example. I'll save these questions for another thread.

Main question I have in this thread is will this lithium bronze reagent react with solid metals such as Al and Cu.

« Last Edit: June 03, 2017, 07:29:45 PM by CrimpJiggler »

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