Potassium Chloride

Formula: KCl

Potassium chloride is a potassium analog of a table salt. It has the same cubic crystalline structure and shape of crystals. Large crystals are easy to grow, but often get cloudy and badly formed.

Properties

• Crystal system: isometric
• Crystal shape: cuboid
• Color: colorless
• Stability on air: very stable

Obtaining

Potassium chloride is used as a fertilizer and can be obtained in gardenig stores, but precence of chloride ion makes it less popular choice than other potassium fertilizers.

Growing

Potassium chloride grows much more easily than NaCl. I used slov evapotation to produce the samples on photos.

Its solubility changes a lot with temperature: 34g/100ml at 20°C; and 51.3g/100ml at 80°C. However, in my experiments cooling of saturated solution only produced large number os thin needle-like crystals.

Safety

This compound is safe.

More photos

See also

• Sodium chloride, NaCl. It has same crystal structure and shape, but is much harder to grow.
• Glucuse sodium chloride, 2C₆H₁₂O₆·NaCl·H₂O. It is a cocrystal of table salt and glucose sugar. It has completely different crystal shape and structure, and also an easy compound to grow.

References

• Wikipedia on potassium chloride
• Crystal growing wiki in Russian