Triton and Core 7 Supersaturation?

Want2BS8ed · Jun 19, 2018

When Triton released Core 7, we were led to believe they had a proprietary method of supersaturating their liquid products. Reef Builders in their introductory article went so far as to speculate Triton was using some form of ultrasound to accomplish this.

After Triton’s announcement yesterday they are moving to dry chemicals to be reconstituted by the end user for 3a & 3b, several posts were made indicating these were not supersaturated but were in fact easily desolvable in less than a liter of RO water.

That leads to the dumb lay-chemistry question of the day: if you were able to supersaturate/saturate a mixture, wouldn’t it eventually participate out?

Randy Holmes-Farley · Jun 19, 2018

Want2BS8ed said:
When Triton released Core 7, we were led to believe they had a proprietary method of supersaturating their liquid products. Reef Builders in their introductory article went so far as to speculate Triton was using some form of ultrasound to accomplish this.

After Triton’s announcement yesterday they are moving to dry chemicals to be reconstituted by the end user for 3a & 3b, several posts were made indicating these were not supersaturated but were in fact easily desolvable in less than a liter of RO water.

That leads to the dumb lay-chemistry question of the day: if you were able to supersaturate/saturate a mixture, wouldn’t it eventually participate out?

OMG. Did they really claim that?

Supersaturation is easy to attain for many chemicals, but it won't say for long.

For a typical sodium carbonate solution, you can warm it to about 40 deg C and reach a peak in solubility. If you saturated it at 40 deg C, and then allowed it to cool to room temp, it will be supersaturated until it precipitates out:

http://hydro-land.com/e/ligne-en/doc/Na2CO3.html

The concentrates sold by ESV clearly had similar issues as when they got cold they often precipitated solids. Warming them and adding back the needed water would dissolve them again. No magic ultra sound is needed (that said, dissolving, even at saturation is not always easy and ultrasound can help that along).

Sodium bicarbonate is also used in some methods (Triton may, in fact, as does ESV Bicarbonate and my Recipe 2). it increases in solubility over an even wider range and thus has even more potential to supersaturate, but it has a much lower solubility to begin with:

http://hydro-land.com/e/ligne-en/doc/NaHCO3.html

Randy Holmes-Farley · Jun 19, 2018

I would also add that the presence of other ions in alk mixes can make precipitation slower or less likely. A lot of sulfate, potassium, etc. will reduce precipitation. That's part of the reason that calcium carbonate is so soluble in seawater relative to fresh water.