Talk:Phosphoryl chloride

Safety / toxicology
With such a high warning on it's NFPA 704 sticker, I would have thought this article could do with some safety information. It's curious, I link from page to page endlessly on here and constantly see big sections about safety and the words toxic being used to describe things, then I come to PCl3 and this article, regarding two extremely dangerous things, and see two sentences for the former and none for the latter; when they're some of the few chemicals scoring a 3/4 for health impact. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.24.47.178 (talk) 05:10, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * You are welcome and encouraged to consult the MSDS, which is carefully cited in each article. Wiki-chem decided essentially not to get into the advice and safety business which is more authoritatively and more officially handled by other means.  But we do give very good chemical knowledge, without giving instructions on how to implement the chemistry. --Smokefoot (talk) 06:56, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

HCl and trialkyl phosphates
Regarding the recent comment in the article: From what I understand, free HCl can attack trialkyl phosphates to give RCl and the corresponding phosphorus acid, and so if you want to avoid this you need a proton scavanger. If you don't add that, you get a product just like you would with PCl5 or SOCl2. Le Chatelier isn't involved here, because the HCl is not taking it back to a P-Cl bond. I had thought the phrase "sensitive to attack" made it clear (I didn't talk about any equilibrium), but maybe it's not. When I write stuff like this, I try to be very concise and not labour the details - but do you think more explanation is needed?

Regarding the need for a Lewis acid, I haven't run the reaction myself so I don't know. However I lifted this information and the MgCl2 example straight from the references I used. I suspect that you can do it either with a Lewis acid or with a base, but perhaps the MgCl2 conditions are the more usual if they were listed in the books I used. I don't have all of those books to hand, but I know I had G&E and 2 or 3 phosphorus books all laid out in front of me when I wrote that section.

Thanks a lot for your comments and scrutiny. Funny to think we didn't even have this article at all four months ago! Cheers, Walkerma 04:35, 23 January 2006 (UTC)