| Abstract: | Sodium azide is a widely used inorganic compound. Besides the commonly used method of "Wislicenus process" which uses ammonia, nitrous and sodium as materials, the hydrazine hydrate route is also employed for the preparation of sodium azide particularly in laboratory. However, because many species are involved in the reaction system, the reaction details for the hydrazine hydrate route are still unclear. A comprehensive understanding of the reaction mechanism may provide meaningful help for optimizing the production process. In this work, the reaction mechanism for the synthesis of sodium azide by hydrazine hydrate route has been studied using density function theory(DFT) method. On the basis of our calculations, the reaction details, including the energetics of ten elementary steps, the structures of intermediates and transition states as well as the influence of inorganic acids and alcohols, were illuminated at the atomistic level. Both the two steps, the generation of key intermediate(NH_2-NH-NO) and the trans-cistransformation of NH_2-NH-NO, are suggested to be the possible rate-limiting step, corresponding to the energy barriers of 20.3 and 22.7 kcal/mol, respectively. In the early reaction steps to generate NH_2-NH-NO, the main role of sulphuric acid is to donate proton, which can be replaced by nitric acid or hydrochloric acid. From the energy point of view, isopropanol has similar reactivity as methanol and ethanol. |
