The corrosive effects of nitric acid are exploited for some specialty applications, such as etching in printmaking, pickling stainless steel or cleaning silicon wafers in electronics.
A solution of nitric acid, water and alcohol, nital, is used for etching metals to reveal the microstructure. ISO 14104 is one of the standards detailing this well known procedure.
Nitric acid is used either in combination with hydrochloric acid or alone to clean glass cover slips and glass slides for high-end microscopy applications. It is also used to clean glass before silvering when making silver mirrors.
Commercially available aqueous blends of 5–30% nitric acid and 15–40% phosphoric acid are commonly used for cleaning food and dairy equipment primarily to remove precipitated calcium and magnesium compounds (either deposited from the process stream or resulting from the use of hard water during production and cleaning). The phosphoric acid content helps to passivate ferrous alloys against corrosion by the dilute nitric acid.
Nitric acid can be used as a spot test for alkaloids like LSD, giving a variety of colours depending on the alkaloid.