The chlorine reacts with the caustic soda, forming sodium hypochlorite, and this in turn, with an excess of chlorine and at higher temperatures, becomes for the most part converted into chlorate, whilst any simultaneous electrolysis of a hydroxide or water and a chloride (so that hydroxyl and chlorine are simultaneously liberated at the anode) also produces oxygen-chlorine compounds direct.
With high current-density, heating the solution tended to increase the proportion of chlorate to hypochlorite, but as the proportion of water decomposed is then higher, the amount of chlorine produced must be less and the total chlorine efficiency lower.
Direct application into the widened wound of calcium hypochlorite, i.e.
The substances used as tests in these reactions are caustic potash and calcium hypochlorite; the former being the substance dissolved in an equal weight of water and the latter a saturated extract of bleaching powder in water.
In his researches on the bleaching compounds of chlorine he was the first to advance the view that bleaching-powder is a double compound of calcium chloride and hypochlorite; and he devoted much time to the problem of economically obtaining soda and potash from seawater, though here his efforts were nullified by the discovery of the much richer sources of supply afforded by the Stassfurt deposits.