Fritz Haber and Nitrogen Fixation Brennan Andrews

Your very existence on this planet has been profoundly impacted by the work of Fritz Haber a man that is not well known by many today He! along with a team of over "#$ scientists and "%$$ technical personal! worked together in the &aiser 'ilhelm (nstitute for )hysikalische and *lektrochemie in a suburb of Berlin
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+here they worked on a multitude of pro,ects before and during

the war -uring his time there Fritz created the Haber process or the Haber.Bosch process vastly improved nitrogen extraction from air +his process is estimated to produce enough fertilizer from the ammonia that is created! to fertilize crops that are making up half the food stuffs that we eat today Fritz Haber grew up in a fairly rich /erman.0ewish family who we highly involved in manufacturing enterprises! in the )russian town Breslau! now 'roclaw! )oland His parents financial affluence allowed him to study at several universities including the 1niversity of Heidelberg and +he university of Berlin! though he finally received his -octorate in organic chemistry in "2"3 from the university of 4harlottenburg +echnische Hochschule
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He was a very studious man who loved school

and called his time doing research there 6+he "7 best working years of my life8 " 9in /erman of course: His research has allowed for many more people to live on this planet then ever before! if he had not created this process food would be much harder to come by because before the ma,ority of nitrogen fertilizer was created by using guano and bird excrement directly and as watered down fertilizer teas ;f course this meant that all of that shit had to be actually mined from somewhere and as the human population has grown the bird and bat populations have not +he human race may very well have been

in a ma,or food crisis at this time had the process of extracting nitrogen from the air not been created 'e as a people owe much to this process and to Fritz Haber ;f course not everything that fritz created was exactly a boon to the human populace After world war one started the ma,ority of his work centered around the production of much less wholesome activities <any of the things that he invented and improved upon were more war based in nature ;ne thing that he was a ma,or part of inventing was the use of toxic gases in war! such as chlorine gas and other such nasty things Also his process of nitrogen fixation was used to created much of the nitrogen used in explosives by the /erman=s during the war ;f course they didn>t win so maybe he should have worked on less deadly pursuits His life was full of many up and downs including his marriage to 4lara (mmerwahr on August "! "3$"
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?he was the first woman to earn a )h - from 1niversity of Breslau +hough his marriage

was not to last the rest of his life as it ended only "@ years later in "3"# +he reason that his marriage ended was kind of karmic as it ended in the one of the worst possible ways ever! she shot herself because she was fundamentally against his use of chemical warfare (t was speculated that it occurred soon after an argument that they had after Fritz had personally overseen the use of the first successful use chlorine gas at the ?econd Battle of Ypres in April of "3"# 'hich seems to have been part of his family as his own son from this marriage killed himself as well %$ years later +hough ( think that his overseeing of the gas as ,ust another experiment ensuring that his newly created weapon worked as he claimed it to He was seen as a genius the /erman command and by the rest of the world because in "3"2 he as awarded the Nobel )rize in 4hemistry for his work on the Haber.Bosch process ;f course he was also interested in many different things including the seperation of gold from sea water! which he later concluded to an entirely uneconomical process +hough also along with his work on chemical warfare and chlorine gas! he also helped to create something that! though highly updated! we still use todayA /as <asks <akes a lot of sense as you dont want your own people suffering from the same weapon that you would use on your enemies +hough

he though on of his other pro,ect>s that he worked on was the production of Byklon.B! used by the nazi>s in ''((! he was a 0ew And as such in "3%%! after the /erman>s forced him to fire "5 other 0ews on his staff! with a promise that he would be able to keep working at the (nstitute! he decided to flee to *ngland where he only stayed for a little while! as he had a slight case of the deads resulting from a heart attack on 0anuary %$th! "3%# in ?witzerland! as he didn>t find himself all that welcome by the people whose soldiers his work had been used on
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<any of his person problems may have resulted from many psychological problems caused by poor genetics as well as the death of his mother who was also his fathers first cousin ;f course those problems are purely speculative He contributed much to the world not all of it good but also not all bad! some being great Cike most people who burn very brightly the lives of others are not the first thing on their minds! ,ust the advancement of themselves! through whatever ways necessary Nitrogen fixation is a process of removing nitrogen from the air through the use of high pressure near 5$$ atm and @$$o 4 and combining it with H5 gas +he eDuation it self in simple! N5 E %H5 F 5NH% +he reason nitrogen is so important is that for plant growth it is the limiting factor <any people have seen the commercials for <iracle /rowtm! though in reality this product is ,ust a high nitrogen formulation fertilizer that the same results can be achieved from any other fertilizer +he reason that it works well for so many people is that most people ,ust don>t get around to adding in the reDuired nitrogen to the same area that they have been growing in for years! which depleted the available nitrogen in the ground *ven though the air is filled with more nitrogen then plants could ever need! N5 gas is triple bonded and plants are able to process it into usable energy # (t has to first be converted into a bioavailable product! which ammonia ,ust happens to be +hough in high concentrations it is Duite toxic to both people and plants +he Haber process takes nitrogen gas from the air and heats it under high pressure in a container at high heat with catalysts of iron with aluminum and potassium oxides

+hough there are other process that have been used to remove nitrogen though they are not Duite as efficient! these include the electric arc process where a powerful electric arc is sent through the air which causes nitrogen and oxygen to combine to create nitrous oxides +he oxides are dissolved in water which then creates nitric acid +his process was developed by Gayleigh in "23# ;f course it reDuires many steps with a high energy reDuirement Another process to produce ammonia was the 4yanamide process! where powered calcium carbide is heated in an atmosphere of pure nitrogen 'hich produces calcium cyanamide and from there ammonia is synthesized A lot of research has been done on how to more efficiently produce ammonia from N5 gas but though there are ways such as power plants that produce excess electricity and removing ammonia from waste water! which is showing considerable progress! as the ammonia must be removed before we can put it back into the environment +o produce the ammonia you need % mol>s of hydrogen! which is mostly derived from natural gas! though other sources are ,ust as acceptable! for every " mol of nitrogen +hey will then be put together in a container with iron and potassium hydroxide +he pressure in the container is raised to 5$$ atmospheres this is also heated to around @$$$ 4 +he reason for the heating is that it forces the reaction to work faster then at lower temperatures! though at lower temperatures the reaction is much more efficient in the production of ammonia ;f course it takes so much longer that it is no longer financially worthwhile ?o in reality only about "#H of the mixture is converted to NH% I +his is because the process is not very efficient at this temperature but it is fast! so the rest is then recycled back into the container and then the process is repeated over and over again ?o while this process has allowed for massive production of ammonia that ends up producing food for over a third of the worlds population at any one time (t is still expensive as the production of the containment vessels which has to maintain a high pressure! this is a problem because the eDuation starts out with @ mol>s of gas and ends up only producing 5 mols of a heavier product +his of course causes the pressure to lower and the lower pressure would cause the reaction to slow down

considerably so thus the pressure must be maintained by continually adding more and more product into the vessel Now according the Ce 4hateliers )rinciple a reaction is favored that produces fewer molecules +hus if we raised the pressure even further the reaction would occur faster! though the pressure of 5$$ atmospheres is a even balancing point as higher pressures have higher costs associated with them +hicker piping and stronger containment vessels among them Also at higher pressures if something fails! the damages to the rest of the manufacturing plant would be much higher ?o it is also somewhat a safety concern A side note! nitrogen fixation also occurs in nature! bacterica in legumes and a few other plants converts the N5 gas to NH% +here is one form of commercial plant production that naturally uses this NH%! rice paddy growth +hey are able to produce about # lbs of NH% per acre per year +hough Cegumes on average are able to produce between 5#.7# lbs acreJyear )eanuts are even better at this and can produce up to 5#$ lbs AcreJyear Addition nitrogen fertilizer isn>t even needed to be added during the entire growth process! though a small amount is added in the beginning to give them a small boost at the beginning 7 +he Haber.Bosch process is used to produce over @#$ millions tonnes of nitrogen fertilizer per year and uses about % percent of the natural gas in this process +his is a problem as natural gas is in finite supply and will take some time to switch to another supply of hydrogen as natural gas is currently the cheapest

'orks 4ited " Hanspeter 'itschi! +oxicological ?ciencies! ;xford 0ournals! ?eptember %! "333 5 httpAJJscience howstuffworks comJdictionaryJfamous.scientistsJchemistsJfritz.haber.info htm % 64hemist! Nobel Caureate! /erman! 0ew8! -ietrich ?toltzenberg! 4hemical Heritage Foundation! 5$$@ @ httpAJJwww nndb comJpeopleJ22@J$$$$35I$2J! NN-B! )rofile on Fritz Haber! 5$"% # httpAJJwww howstuffworks comJnitrogen.fixation.info htm! Nitrogen Fixation I httpAJJwww chemguide co ukJphysicalJeDuilibriaJhaber html 7 httpAJJaces nmsu eduJpubsJKaJA"53J! Nitrogen Fixation by Cegumes! *nvironmental ?ciences New <exico ?tate 1niversity