Talk:Ammonium bicarbonate

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Is ammonium bicarbonate unstable at alkaline pH? For example at a pH of 7.2 to 7.4, would ammonium bicarbonate in a physiologic solution, such as a tissue culture medium break down to carbon dioxide and ammonia, the carbon dioxide being removed into the culture atmosphere and the ammonia being transaminated with pyruvate to from alanine? Also, would ammonium carbonate act in a similar fashion?

Any comments to patrick.quinn@coopersurgical.com

I agree with Patrick Quinn, this section gives false claims on physical properties of Ammonium bicarbonate.

It says the decomposition is endothermic but doesn't give the energy in the following equation. Somehow this information seems to be hard to acquire. Could someone put it in? Jim Bowery (talk) 20:48, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Assessment comment

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A good start. Should mention biochemical and analytical use as a volatile buffer (chromatography and electrophoresis). A problem in these fields is formation of ammonium carbamate, which takes more heat to remove than you want. For this reason it's best to make your buffer fresh by bubbling CO2 (from the solid) into aqueous ammonia. When I had access to the literature I couldn't find any good primary references to this old and apparantly reliable information. Once upon a time biochemists avoided the limitation by using pyridine bicarbonate. If you redistill the components through a vigreux column, chromatographic fractions give nice clean nmr spectra. I was introduced to this in 1967, but again don't know who thought of it. Brethenshort (talk) 21:35, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Last edited at 21:35, 13 June 2009 (UTC). Substituted at 07:37, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Odd item in list of other names, probable slight confusion with Ammonium carbonate page, safety info?

Very interesting stuff.

First I believe that the other name Baking soda in the info box may be erroneous and shown up due to function similarity rather than historical use. It is indicated that use of baker's ammonia, in baking, pre-dates Baking soda and it was already presumably called baker's ammonia at the time so it seems unlikely it would have taken on the name of the successor that contains 'soda' where this chemical does not. The page for Ammonium carbonate (a very close chemical cousin) has baker's ammonia and E503 in the info box and I think that they would better reflect other names for Ammonium bicarbonate than Baking soda and match the comparable usage in the linked lists below.

Reagent_index

E503

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The section Salt of Hartshorn seems to have a bit of a problem. It starts with Compositions containing ammonium carbonate have long been known. and then confuses me totally as to what compound is called sal volatile or salt of hartshorn and/or ammonium sesquicarbonate and what happens to the carbonate component when the carbamate is dissolved away leaving the bicarbonate residue.

I'm not sure how it is worded in the source material but it reads pretty weird to me now.

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It has been a kitchen chemical for many decades before safety concerns were popular and was not, as far as I can tell, replaced by Baking soda or similar modern products due to safety concerns. The safety section lacks balance and looks like something taken out of a MSDS intended for the lab culture of the High Performance Liquid Chromatography industry. If the warnings were as severe for every household baking ingredient (acetic acid, citric acid, tartaric acid, MSG, salt, sodium bicarbonate, No-Salt etc), people would be scared to enter their kitchens let alone prepare food. It is more likely that the smell during baking, incompatibility with moist cakes and decomposing nature of the product caused it to loose favour in the popular baking culture. It is still used commercially, available for retail in (at least) Finland and does not have big danger labels and is listed as E503 for allowed food additives so cannot be quite as scary as made out here. I have never used it, but plan to experiment, so I am sad to see it get such a bad reputation due to overzealous laboratory caution.

Idyllic press (talk) 22:40, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Use as raising agent

In biscuits that have very low water content normal baking powder doesn't work as it's reaction needs water. Ammonium bicarbonate on the other hand needs only heat to release its carbondioxide and thus is used in when making doughs from grease, sugar and flour without any water.Linkato1 (talk) 16:00, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Natural occurrence

Although rarely, it occurs in the nature, as teschemacherite; ref = MINDAT. Eudialytos (talk) 00:58, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Smelling Salts

Is this the compound used for that in the old days? Jokem (talk) 02:04, 31 October 2022 (UTC)