ALUMINUM NITRATE NONAHYDRATE 99.99% TRACE METALS BASIS (C15-1281-850)

General description

Aluminum nitrate is a white-to-colorless salt, typically encountered as the crystalline nonahydrate. It is soluble in water, methanol, ethanol, and ethylene glycol. Like many trivalent nitrates, aluminum nitrate nonahydrate has a low melting temperature and decomposition temperature. Aluminum nitrate nonahydrate melts at 74 °C and decomposes at temperatures below 100 °C, by losing nitric acid and water, dinitrogen trioxide and oxygen gas, and forming aluminum oxide.
Aluminum nitrate is synthesized by reacting nitric acid with aluminum hydroxide.

Application

Aluminum nitrate is primarily used to produce coatings of alumina and aluminum fluoride. Because of its solubility, its activity as a strong oxidizing agent, and its low decomposition temperature, aluminum nitrate is a great source of aluminum for conformal coatings by wet chemistry methods. For example, researchers have coated LiCoO₂ cathode materials in AlF₃ by dispersing LiCoO₂ nanoparticles in aqueous solutions of aluminum nitrate and adding ammonium fluoride at modest temperatures of 80 °C.

Aluminum nitrate nonahydrate is also commonly used as a precursor in the synthesis of layered double hydroxides (LDHs). LDHs, which can easily be exfoliated into nanosheets, are high-surface area materials used as catalyst supports and under investigation for removing pollutants from water.

Our aluminum nitrate can also be used as an effective aluminum dopant for metal oxides. In these syntheses, aluminum nitrate is dissolved with other metal nitrates. The materials are either reacted by sol-gel processing, co-precipitation followed by calcination, or direct hydrothermal reactions. Because of the low reaction temperatures of these processes with metal nitrates, the products are often high-surface area nanoparticles. For example, researchers produced Al-doped spinel Co₃O₄ for water oxidation applications by sol-gel methods using cobalt nitrate and aluminum nitrate.