Birkeland-Eyde process fixation

The discovery of chemical N2 fixation under ambient conditions is more compatible with a simple, complementary, low temperature and low pressure system, possibly operated electrochemically and driven by a renewable energy resource (qv), such as solar, wind, or water power, or other off-peak electrical power, located near or in irrigation streams. Such systems might produce and apply ammonia continuously, eg, directly in the rice paddy, or store it as an increasingly concentrated ammoniacal solution for later appHcation. In fact, the Birkeland-Eyde process of N2 oxidation in an electric arc has been... 

Birkeland Eyde Process. See under Nitrogen Fixation Processes... 

Biological nitrogen fixation presented a chemical enigma. The two major industrial procedures employed to cause atmospheric dinitrogen to enter chemical combination, like the few available laboratory methods, required drastic conditions. The obsolete Birkeland-Eyde process required exposure of dinitro-... 

Other commercial processes for nitrogen fixation include the cyanide process [20], in which potassium cyanide is produced by passing nitrogen through a tube containing a red-hot mixture of potash and carbon the cyanamide process [21], in which calcium is heated to about 1000°C under nitrogen to form calcium cyanamide (CaNCN) and the arc process [20] (also known as the Birkeland-Eyde process), in which nitrogen is oxidized... 

Before 1900 the large-scale production of nitric acid was based entirely on the reaction of concentrated sulfuric acid with NaNOa and KNOj (p. 407). The first successful process for making nitric acid directly from Ni and O2 was devised in 1903 by E. Birkeland and S. Eyde in Norway and represented the first industrial fixation of nitrogen ... 

The process is named for the Norwegian physicist and chemist Kristian Olaf Bernhard Birkeland (1867-1917) and the Norwegian engineer and industrialist Samuel Eyde (1866-1940). See also nitrogen fixation. 

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