[MizzVani]

Hi.. I am new to this forum but I have a question.

I am in no way a chemist but I am a spectroscopist. I create laser plasmas from droplets and I have been interested in creating laser plasmas with bismuth trichloride.
Since bismuth trichloride decomposes to an oxychloride in water I have been dissolving the crystals in methanol and hcl. I have not used acetone because I am using plastic lines to run my solution.

My solution involves
15g of bismuth trichloride crystals
5ml of hcl
5ml of methanol

The BiCl3 dissolves however when look at the spectrum I am getting, I have no bismuth lines (at all) Where is the bismuth going??? I have had trouble increasing the amount BiCl3 in my solution because it is very viscous and it is hard to make droplets from it.

Please, if anyone has done any work with dissolving bismuth trichloride or understands the chemistry behind this..please give me even the slightest bit of information!

Thanks!

[renge ishyo]

Could you be looking at a complex ion of Bismuth in solution? I know that the atomic spectrum for Bismuth (which you would not be expected to see here) is in the UV (202nm~307nm), but I don't have the numbers for ionized or complexed Bismuth so I don't know where those would appear offhand. A good thing in situations like this is to check is the cuvette you are using. A lot of the cheaper cuvettes absorb in the UV range and this would "block out" your bismuth lines if they show up there. The other possibility of course is that spectral lines might be showing up, but the absorptions might be quite small and hard to detect on your spectrograph. It might be worthwhile to "scan the baseline" in the blank spectrum and dissolved bismuth spectrum to try and confirm that Bismuth is indeed present in solution before looking for a strong identifier to measure.

You probably already know all of this, but I will throw it out there anyways