Contact process
Industrial method of sulfuric acid production

The contact process is a method for manufacturing sulfuric acid in the high concentrations needed for industrial processes. Platinum was originally used as the catalyst for this reaction; however, because it is susceptible to reacting with arsenic impurities in the sulfur feedstock, vanadium(V) oxide (V2O5) has since been preferred.
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This entry incorporates text from “Contact process” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.