When I was a mere lad there was a chemical fertiliser plant next to the village I lived in. Part of the works was a lead chamber sulphuric acid plant with a Glover and a Gay-Lussac tower which emitted a stinking yellow stream of fumes. All this has gone now but during a good old days discussion the other day someone came up with the remark that the input to the plant was copper pyrites being burnt and the flue gas used to make the acid. I don't recall anything about copper bearing ash being shipped out but I suppose it could have been. Does this sound right to our chemists?
Ass a chemist and chemistry teacher, I could not recall the lead chmber process as it was obsolete on the industrial scale and therefore not taught in detail Google provided this link
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suggests that your memry may be flawed. there are other references on google which may help
If there was copper pyrites, I would imagine you had a copper smelters, who used the waste sulphur for making acid via the scrubber (which from your description of the chimney didn't work very well: bet all people's washing used to fall to bits!), rather than an acid plant per se. They would not waste copper ore just to make sulphuric acid. Just about the only UK source would have been in Cornwall: is that where your village was?
Not a chemist but had just been reading about hydrochloric and sulphuric acid, in Vol 2 of Harmsworth's popular science (1911). The sulphur source would have been a by-product from the LeBlanc process or direct from roasted Iron Pyrites. The sulphur free pyrites clinker then mixed with salt and re-roasted, giving copper chloride. The copper along with silver and gold residues then extracted leaving a pure iron oxide for supply to the steel makers. It was the copper content that regulated the pyrites price. Seems the sulphur was just a means to an end.
Indeed!. It's quite clear we were the world's leading eugenicists at the time. Amazing how our eugenics history could be so easily edited/ revised/deleted after WW2. Love reading the books though. So utterly non-PC they would cause a greenie to look for urgent counselling. White superiority, the Empire, the British as world leaders in virtually everything, industry/ machinery/engineering as the means to any end, jingoism by the bucketful. But also offering masses of basic 'truths' and analysis that apply moreso today and an almost tactile national pride in our achievements and history. The books are the intellectual equivalent of eating a mucky fat sandwich, followed by a couple of Capstan full strength :)
Round our way thy just tarmacked over the gasworks and called it Lidl & Sainsburys; and Laporte's waste they tarmacked over and called it Aldi & B&Q. The latter being not such a bad idea as for half a century they were dumping right over an adit to one of the town's main wells...
In the lead chamber process, sulphur dioxide was produced by roasting either pyrites or 'spent iron oxide', a bi-product of gas works, both being sulphides of iron. Copper ores could in theory also be used as they usually contained significant amounts of sulphur, present as both copper pyrites CuFeS2 and Chalcocite, Cu2S. The copper smelting industry was based in South Wales, mostly in the Tawe Valley, and they pioneered the recovery and utilisation of sulphur dioxide from smelter gas. But smelting of pyritic ores in South Wales ended early in the last century; thereafter only refining of imported, pre-smelted metallic blister copper was done there. So even if you grew up in South Wales, it would seem unlikely that copper pyrites was the source of the sulphur for the acid plant.
The sulphur dioxide produced by roasting these sulphides was subsequently oxidised to sulphur trioxide by nitric oxide, NO2, before being dissolved in water to give sulphuric acid. The nitric oxide was reduced to nitrous oxide, NO, and was then re-oxidised back to nitric oxide by reacting with air. In theory, the nitrogen oxides just re-circulated within the plant, being recovered in the Gay-Lussac tower, but some nitric oxide still tended to escape with the waste gases. Nitric oxide is a pungent yellow-brown gas. I would guess this was what you saw being emitted from the plant. Nitric oxide was also an intermediary in the production of nitric acid and thus ammonium nitrate, a common nitrogenous fertiliser used by farmers, and these days, terrorists.
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