Preparing 1 kg of zinc sulphate?

Question

If zinc sulphate is produced through the following equation, what quantities of H2SO4 and ZnO each be needed to produce 1 kg of ZNSO4.

H2SO4 + ZnO >> ZnSO4 + H2O

Moreover, by simply looking at reaction, like the one above, Is there any science or industrial/analytical way of finding out, what quantities of x,y chemicals would be needed to produce 1kg of z (e.g producing MGSO4, Ferrous Chloride, 1 step reactions)

Answer 1

Why does JohnDX54 think that zinc sulphate is spelled zinc sulfate?

Answer 2

First off, it's spelled sulfate. Now that we have that out of the way we can find out how much H2SO4 and ZnO we would need to produce 1 kg, or 1000 g of ZnSO4. Before we do that lets first find the molecular weights of the three major species in this reaction:

ZnSO4 = 161.48 g/mol

H2SO4 = 98.074 g/mol

ZnO = 81.41 g/mol

Use the periodic table to find the molecular weight of each element in a compound and just add them all up. Note the subscripts tell you that there is more than one molecule of a particular element (e.g. there are 4 molecules of O in ZnSO4, so when you want to find the molecular weight of all of the O in this compound you have to multiply the molecular weight of O, which is 16, by a factor of 4).

So now we have to use the stoichiometry of the reaction to find out how much of the reactants we need to give us exactly 1000 g of product. I'm answering this in terms of grams of product instead of kg of product because molecular weight is expressed in terms of grams per mole and its easier to work with grams now and just convert back to kg when I'm done.

For H2SO4:

(1kg ZnSO4)(1000g / 1kg)(1mol ZNSO4/ 161.48 g ZNSO4)(1mol H2SO4/ 1mol ZnSO4)(98.074 g H2SO4/ 1mol H2SO4) = 607.34 g H2SO4 = 0.607 kg H2SO4

In words: You have 1 kg of ZnSO4, which is equal to 1000g of ZnSO4. Since I know the mass of ZnSO4 I can use the molar mass of ZnSO4 to find the moles of ZnSO4. Once I know the moles of ZnSO4 I can use the fact that for every 1 mole of H2SO4 there is 1 mole of ZnSO4 to find the moles of H2SO4. Now that I know the number of moles of H2SO4 I can use the molar mass of H2SO4 to find the mass of H2SO4 required to produce 1000 g of ZnSO4. We use a similar step by step process to find the mass of ZnO.

For ZnO:

(1kg ZNSO4)(1000g / 1kg)(1mol ZNSO4/ 161.48 g ZNSO4)(1mol ZnO/ 1mol ZnSO4)(81.41 g ZnO/ 1mol ZnO) = 504.15 g ZnO4 = 0.504 kg ZnO

Notice that the only difference here is that I replace H2SO4 for ZnO.

I came to these results be looking at the reaction you gave me and you can follow a similar procedure for any complete balanced chemical reaction. So I have already answered your second question by doing this. Chemists determine how much reactants they need to produce a certain amount of product by performing simple calculations like this. This particular reaction is quite easy because the stoichiometry is only 1:1. The stoichiometry could be 2:1, 3:1 or 1000:100,000, etc, but as long as you know how to read and understand a reaction its really easy