Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Author: Subject: Ruthenium(III) chloride - RuCl3 Ruthenium(III) chloride - RuCl3


I am looking for this ruthenium salt for a small project on oxidative cleavage. The nature of the compounds used require this exact reagent to avoid over-oxidation.

The metal is easily available even in powder/sponge form, but unfortunately, making chloride salt from it seems to be difficult for an amateur (direct chlorination, high temperatures, carbon oxide...).

I found there is Ru(II) and Ru(IV) oxides available on Alibaba. Maybe the oxides could be converted?

My last resort is to ask a Latvian chemical provider who can order reagents for me, but it is usually very expensive. I am from EU.

If you are from the EU, you should also consider buying RuCl3*xH2O from onyxmet: http://onyxmet.com/?route=product/product&path=69_109&am...

Hydrated salt is perfectly OK for my purpose.

Yes I am from central Europe, this company is just around the corner (Poland), thanks!

[Edited on 5-6-2019 by nimgoldman]

We also sell RuCl3.
Price 5 EUR/g + shipping
Please mail me an sales[@]chemcraft[.]ru

I've recently acquired some ruthenium hydroxide which I am hoping will dissolve easily in HCl(aq)...

edit: it doesn't......

[Edited on 7-6-2019 by DavidJR]

Use bleach to dissolve the so-called Ru-hydroxide. It most likely is RuO2.xH2O. This stuff is quite inert, but you can dissolve it in bleach as olive green RuO4(-), which on standing forms red RuO4(2-).




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Yeah, on reading I discovered that "ruthenium (III) hydroxide" is a complete misnomer. It is indeed quite inert.

I put 50mg of the "ruthenium hydroxide" in a test tube and added a couple of millilitres of conc HCl. Nothing seemed to happen which was disappointing - I was hoping it would dissolve right away. However, I came back to the test tube the next day and there was a slight colouration of the supernatant liquid, though the solid left didn't look much less than what I started with. So it does dissolve in concentrated HCl, albeit VERY slowly at room temp.

So, since it reacts slowly the logical next thing to try was heating it up. I weighed 500mg of the "hydroxide" and covered it with conc. HCl and boiled it for a few hours, topping up with more HCl(aq) as necessary. I managed to dissolve most of the 500mg.



It all depends how fresh the ruthenium hydroxide is. Freshly precipitated will dissolve even in weakly acidic solutions.

Neither flask nor beaker.


"Kid, you don't even know just what you don't know. "
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