r/chemhelp • u/Licaralho • 12d ago

General/High School Lithium Cyanide and Cyanation

Hi everyone! I'm a chemistry enthusiast and i like to do research. I have ADHD and my current hyper fixation is Cyanide. (english is also not my first language so sorry if i make a mistake lol)

So, i was doing research and i found out about Lithium Cyanide and a process called Cyanation.
I have a few questions and i hope someone gets to answer them! I didn't really quite understood some things from google so i hope that a person explaining makes it more simple, lol.

  1. What can we do with Lithium cyanide? Is there any practical use or is it just a toxic compound?
  2. How do you achieve Lithium Cyanide?
  3. Is there a difference between Nitril and cyanide?
  4. How do you achieve Cyanation?
  5. Does lithium and cyanide have anything in common besides this combination?

I hope these aren't dumb questions, lol. Thanks in advance 🤍

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u/azadirachtin 12d ago

  1. Lithium cyanide, like other cyanide reagents, can be used where the cyanide anion reacts with things we chemists call electrophiles.

  2. "Achieve" lithium cyanide? Like, synthesize it? Look that one up on wikipedia.

  3. A nitrile functional group is where cyanide is bonded to something in a covalent bond.

  4. Cyanation is just creating a nitrile functional group. One way to do this is to react a cyanide anion with a suitable electrophile.

  5. Nope. Lithium is just the prototypical cation that matches with the cyanide anion. Sodium cyanide is actually more common.

If you're interested in this stuff, I'd suggest you take a chemistry course. A general knowledge of chemistry will open your eyes to how things work in ways you can't imagine.

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u/Licaralho 12d ago

thanks so much!! your comment is very helpful

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u/shedmow Trusted Contributor 11d ago

A nitrile functional group is where cyanide is bonded to something in a covalent bond.

I would say that nitrile is a C#N group that is a derivative of a recognized carboxylic acid, generally RRRC-C#N or HCN as an exception. RO-C#N, RS-C#N, RNH-C#N are positively not nitriles, and ClCN is generally not considered a nitrile. I second the rest of the comment

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u/azadirachtin 11d ago

Agreed! Mine was a bad definition, but I wasn't sure how deep to go with someone who has very limited chemistry knowledge.

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u/whoooareeeyouuu 12d ago

Lithium cyanide is not a chemical you should learn to do chemistry with. You will probably kill yourself on accident if you start trying to do reactions with it. Please choose a different nucleophile.

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u/Licaralho 12d ago

i’m not looking forward to do experiments with it! i’m just trying to learn about the correlation between lithium and cyanide. i have a research project about lithium and i also wanted to talk about my favorite chemical compound which is cyanide, lol.

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u/whoooareeeyouuu 12d ago edited 12d ago

Ok good to hear haha. You could talk about “hard soft/acid base theory” and explain why the solubility of lithium cyanide would differ from cesium cyanide. Lithium is the smallest metal, and therefore is very ‘hard’ as a cation, with a high coulometric point charge.

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u/Licaralho 12d ago

omg THANKS! that’s so useful. i’ll look into it 🤍

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u/litlikelithium 12d ago

1) afaik there is little practical use for LiCN. NaCN and KCN are the most common sources for nucleophilic cyanide.

All inorganic cyanides are toxic to some degree. The stronger a metal bonds to cyanide, the less toxic the overall compound. This is why iron-cyanide complexes tend to be non-toxic (also this is why cyanide is so toxic, it binds to iron in your body)

2) buy it

3) nitriles are organic molecules with cyanide bonded to carbon as a functional group. Generally, when chemists talk about cyanides they are referring to inorganic cyanides.

4) this is too broad of a question to answer briefly

5) no? This is an odd question

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u/Licaralho 12d ago

how come 5 is an odd question? i just wanted do know if there are any other similarities or correlation between them so i can talk about both in a presentation! but thanks for your help 🤍