nitric acid productionThe principal method of manufacture of nitric acid is the catalytic oxidation of ammonia. In the method developed by the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald in 1901, ammonia gas is successively oxidized to nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide by air or oxygen in the presence of a platinum gauze catalyst. The nitrogen dioxide is absorbed in water to form nitric acid. The resulting acid-in-water solution......and from autocatalysis, which he considered essential to biological systems. His most famous contribution to applied chemistry was on catalytic oxidation of ammonia to nitric acid, a patented process that is still used in the industrial production of fertilizers.
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