Regluing Titebond and Liquid Hide joints

nitrogen fertilizer explanation

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

The "nitrogen" in fertilizer is a nitrogen containing chemical, either urea or ammonium nitrate. Either nitrate(a combination of nitrogen and oxygen) or ammonia (a combination of nitrogen and hydrogen) can be used by plants to make whatever they make that requires nitrogen, protein for example. Urea reacts with water in the earth to make ammonia which in turn is taken up by the plant.

Long ago the only source of nitrogen fertilizer was urea from bird poop or nitrate (salt peter) from bird poop that had reacted with oxygen to make nitrate. Lighting strikes are a significant source of nitrate. The high energy of a strike can cause nitrogen to combine with oxygen.

Decades ago a German chemist found a way to combine nitrogen from air with hydrogen from natural gas at hundreds of pounds of pressure and hundreds of degrees hot to make ammonia. This ammonia could then be converted to nitrate and the nitrate to gun powder and TNT to blow up Europe. Ain't science grand! But this chemistry also enabled a lot of the world to avoid starvation because these chemicals could be used to grow more abundant crops.

Some believe that ammonia made by the Haber process is different from ammonia made from bird poop. This belief would require that nitrogen comes in different forms when in fact it all came from air. If these people ever had high school chemistry they should have received a failing grade because they didn't learn much.

Re: PS-cyanoacrylate trivia

E Phillip Smith

Bill is spot on cyanoacrylates. Early in my career as chemist I supervised production of tons of the stuff. In the early days it was called Eastman 910 adhesive. Last step was pulling high vacuum on the reactor for hours to get final properties. The reactor was purged with N2 (nitrogen) before this last step. I can assure you that it is inert to Nitrogen.

That said the reaction to polymerize (set) is catalyzed by an array of compounds. Amines (ammonia and more complex forms ) will catalyze the reaction at the ppm level. Some days when I would walk into the plant one of the adjoining operations would be running a process that made amine derivatives because of the faint odder in the air. I always knew is was going to be a bad day in 910 production. No reactor is ever perfectly sealed and even very small air leak with an amine present was enough to give a cloudy batch of 910.

Re: PS-cyanoacrylate trivia

William Duffield

This is a picky comment, but nitrogen does react under normal conditions by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the root nodules of legumes. At least that is normal here, where I'm surrounded by fields full of soybeans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_fixation

Re: nitrogen fertilizer explanation

Yonak

Thank you, Bill for the typically interesting and coherent (for the non-chemist) answer from you. It makes a lot of sense and provides good insight, especially to the synthesis of ammonia.