How come acid doesn’t eat through glass like it does everything else?

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How come acid doesn’t eat through glass like it does everything else?

In: Chemistry

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Dissolution, whether acidic or alkaline, is dependent on the solute’s tendency to shed or accumulate electrons when in contact with a solvent. Glass is remarkably stable at a molecular level. It’s like a properly booked flight, where there are no empty seats, and every passenger has a seat. It takes a lot of convincing to move a passenger off, or allow a passenger on.

Anonymous 0 Comments

glass is just heated silicate (sand). So it’s a ceramic. Most acids corrosive properties don’t interact to the same extent with ceramics as they do with organic tissue or even most metals

As to why? The molecular structure of glass is just less reactive. SiO2 in a heated and cooled crystalline form is physically fragile but chemically very stable. This has it’s pros and cons from a material science standpoint. A more brittle structure, but one that happens to be less reactive with harsher acids.. Now if you’re going the breaking bad route and we’re trying to get flexible, I suppose there are some plastic options on the table

Anonymous 0 Comments

Acid doesn’t eat through everything else either. there are other materials that acid doesn’t dissolve. like plastics for example.

also, there’s no such thing as plain “acid”. which chemical substance specifically are you talking about?

because hydrofluoric acid does in fact dissolve glass.

meanwhile something like citric acid is too weak to dissolve metals and most other materials.

acidic substances react with different materials depending on the strength of the acid. different acids will react with materials in different ways.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Basically, think of acid like…students in school.

Susy, she is a whiz at mathematics. A train leaves Denver at 9AM traveling 59 Miles per hours, so how many apples does Joey have if his brother meets the train in Albuquerque? She knows. It’s her thing.

Jose? He only knows he has 8 fingers and 2 thumbs because he was told. Can’t do mathematics to save his own skin…but can spell Tetraethyllead in three languages. He knows. It’s his thing.

Acids are just like that, they have tasks they’re good at and not good at. Some acids, like hydrofluoric acid, it ***does*** eat through glass. To store it, it has to be stored in certain plastics or lead. Pour it in a glass bottle and in a while you don’t have a bottle, you have a funnel; it’ll eat the bottom of the bottle away. Pour it in a polyethylene (plastic) bottle? No problem. Indefinite storage life.

So, you have to know what the acid you’re dealing with does. How it interacts with other materials. Not every acid can be stored in glass. Not every acid can be stored in plastic.

Anonymous 0 Comments

TLDR: Acid doesnt eat through everything, glass is very inert and not all acids/alkalines damage it, some do tho

First of all, different acids are good at different things. Royal Water for example is a pretty damn aggressive acid (its a mix of hydrochloric and nitric acid, in a 1:3 molar ratio). It eats through pretty much every metal, including noble ones such as gold. Other acids, such as sulfurous (NOT sulfuric!) acid dont dissolve all that much. Sulfurous acid is used as a bleach and disinfectant.

Theres also alkalines, which chemically work the opposite way and also dissolve stuff. Theres also stronger and weaker ones, but we dont need to get into detail here.

All alkalines and acids need to be stored in an appropriate container. Usually thats glass, because its a very inert substance (meaning it doesnt like to react with other chemicals). However some acids/alkalines can eat through glass, they then need a different material, such as certain plastics or ceramics.

The reason glass is so inert is because the silicone – oxygen bond is very strong and most other chemicals simply do not have the attraction needed to break this bond, meaning they cant react.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It does. [Etched glass](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=etched+glass) is very common, and is generally made by using acid to eat away at the glass, while using a stencil to mask the design. For this application, they use an[ acid in cream form](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=glass+etching+cream) to make application easier. Large cities actually often have a ban against selling that stuff to minors, because graffiti writers use it to [put their tag on windows](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Etching_tag_chicago.jpg), which is permanent and requires replacing the whole pane of glass to remove.

Anonymous 0 Comments

All an acid means is that when you add it too water it will result in a solution with an excess of H^(+) ions. pH tells you howm many of those ions there are per mole. It doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about how reactive it is. Citric acid has a pH of around 3 but will take a while to dissolve your teeth and you can pour it on your hand to no effect.

Hydrofluoric acid has a pH between 4 and 5. Spilling it on your hand will burn it as well as it absorbing through to youer bones and beginning to dissolve them if you spilt enough of it. It will also dissolve glass.

So acidity alone doesn’t ell you the wholöe or even that much of the story. other chemistry is more important.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Glass is made of two things silicon and oxygen. to dissolve it you need to be able to separate these two things apart. Think of these as a husband and wife.

Their bond is quite strong as its quite a stable relationship.

Then comes the homewrecker called acid bringing their attractive ions along. Other couples are attracted to these ions more than their husband/wife therefore they dissolve. The bond in glass is too strong more most acids to break.

Except hydroflouric acid. They’re the kneau reeves of the acid world. HOT.

Edit: after a long hard think… Im leaving the typos in.

Edit2: thanks for all the awards! Was not expecting that!

Anonymous 0 Comments

This just has a lot to do with the actual ~~crystal~~ atomic structure of glass and how easy it is for the molecules in the acid to get in and break apart bonds in the glass molecule and also how willing the glass is to react with the acid. For some reason, most acids are bad at this. I don’t know the specifics myself since it was unimportant for my education in micro tech fabrication, but I *do* know that most acids that you know of actually do dissolve glass. They just aren’t very good at it. The most notable exception is hydrofluoric acid. It absolutely shreds through glass and, coincidentally, will do the same to your bones so it’s not exactly a safe chemical under normal use.

Hydrochloric acid (one you’ve probably heard of) is ~10x slower than hydrofluoric acid at eating away glass at the same concentration. And really, most other acids just do worse from then on.

The question is basically the same for any other material. In most cases, many solids really only have one acid that is particularly good at dissolving it. Not that there aren’t more than *can* do it, it’s just that there is usually a clear best.

Edit: glass isn’t crystalline (well, at least for the glass we are talking about here)

Anonymous 0 Comments

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