Currently I have a few big projects that I'm working on concurrently that all of my lab time is contributing to in one way or another. I thought it would be good to set down an outline of what these are. Tetraphenylmethane total synthesis My main interest is organic synthesis, and being fairly new to … Continue reading An Overview of my Long Term Projects
Yesterday I decided to take a stab at a reaction that is famous among amateur chemists- the reduction of potassium hydroxide to elemental potassium using magnesium, catalyzed by a small amount of t-butanol. Unfortunately, I couldn't seem to get the reaction mixture hot enough, so nothing happened, but this is what I did: Procedure Using … Continue reading Failed Attempt at Potassium Isolation
As you can see, I now have a blog! I had been debating a lot about whether or not to continue my YouTube channel. On one hand, I enjoy sharing my experiments with others, and I like getting public feedback. On the other hand, I realized that I hate editing videos, and if you've seen my videos, you'll … Continue reading Hello!
I attempted to synthesize Martius yellow (2,4-dinitro-1-naphthol) today using the procedure from Fieser's Experiments in Organic Chemistry, which may be found in the Sciencemadness library. Unfortunately, I did not get the expected results. Procedure: 10 mL of 95% ACS grade sulfuric acid was added swiftly to a 50 mL Erlenmeyer flask containing 5 grams of … Continue reading Failed synthesis of Martius yellow
This morning I decided to purify some of the commercial 1-naphthol that I have. 1-naphthol is supposed to be a pure white solid, but the commercial stuff that I have is light brown, despite being an unopened bottle from Acros Organics and claiming 99+% purity. I suppose it's either old or whatever the brown impurity … Continue reading Purification of commercial 1-naphthol
On Christmas I decided to make some more benzene because I was running low. I followed Nile Red's video, as I had in the past, and got a 67% yield, which is a little low, but not bad.The distillation apparatus used to distill benzene from a mixture of sodium benzoate and sodium hydroxide. The reactants … Continue reading Distillation of Benzene and Workup of “Orange Stuff”
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