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Asked by badmanacid to Elizabeth, James, Martin, Martin, Rob on 11 Mar 2015.
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Robert Woolfson answered on 11 Mar 2015:
There are two answers. The strongest traditional acid is one called sulphuric acid. It’s pretty useful stuff, but very very nasty. It can make you blind if it gets in your eyes or cause really nasty burns. However, if you mix it with water then and make it really weak then you can use it to clean the drains in your house.
Any acid that’s stronger than sulphuric acid is called a super acid. These get ridiculously strong, and the strongest one know is known as fluoroantimonic acid. It’s a molecule of two parts [H2F]+ and [SbF6]- that basically sit together and don’t do very much until they come into contact with something. It has to be stored in plastic because it reacts with glass, and if it comes near any water (even in the air), it will produce something called hydrogen fluoride which can kill you with extremely low doses.
Both of them are very nasty, but you can buy very weak sulphuric acid in the shops, while fluoroantimonic acid is extremely hard to get and even most professional chemists won’t work with it.
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James Coombs OBrien answered on 11 Mar 2015:
Yes Rob has it right, it is Fluoroantimonic acid – nasty stuff. It’s only real use it to add hydrogen to molecules.
Another pretty strong acid which you may have heard of is called Aqua Regia. It is often used to dissolve precious metals like gold, silver or platinum and is made from mixing nitric acid and hydrochloric acid together. It was discovered sometime during the 1500’s and has been used throughout history. It’s a very famous and nasty acid!
But acids aren’t all dangerous, some have important uses such as for taste. A cool acid that you definitely would have tasted is citric acid. It gives the sour taste to fruit like lemons and limes! But I wouldn’t drink the other acids we have been talking about…
Thanks for your question!
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Martin Ward answered on 12 Mar 2015:
I think the dangerous list has been covered – fluoro acids are very nasty things indeed! To put it in to (some sort of) perspective it has been suggested that is the Alien creature from the film Alien was real, that its blood would have been a fluoro acid of some sort – this stuff was seen to melt through everything it touched including glass, thick metal and even people!
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Elizabeth Cooper answered on 13 Mar 2015:
Like the others said fluoroantimonic acid is the strongest acid however I have never used it and im guessing it is not readily avaiable (fortunatley).
The most common strongest acid would have to hydrofluoric acid. Again I do not work with this (im quite glad about this!). This is nasty stuff and if it gets on your skin it will penetrate to your bone and try to pull the calcium out of your bones.
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