Okay so I’ve been prepping to start down a whole new rabbit hole…phenethylamines.
The hardest part for me to find in my country - or even out of country, due to shipping concerns, has been the nitromethane.
The absolute best I could come up with was finding a supplier from another EU country of a 40% w/w mix of nitromethane and whatever solvent I choose.
I therefore went for DCM - both useful (once distilled a couple times) and also doesn’t form an azeotrope with the NM. Correct?
My question is this, why is it I can’t just set my mantle at 45c or whatever the low bp of DCM is and wait for it to stop boiling and for it to stop coming over, then move my mantle up to 101c for the NM to come over?
Why, when I did my first distillation of the DCM/NM mix, does it pull DCM across all the way up to 100c? At which point you obviously swap out the collection flask and then redistil it…
I get that but why does it pull it across at all temps between the bp of DCM all the way up to and then past the BP of NM?
That’s the first part of the question, the second part is, is it quite common for nitromethane to turn yellow?
I was chatting to GPT and it said that NM is clear and if it has a yellow tinge it’s an impurity - now I know it’s not always correct regarding chem questions, however, I then googled it and sciencemadness came up with people talking about it…
I intend to, of course, re-distil the NM tomorrow and then basically proceed straight to my first Henry reaction…
The hardest part for me to find in my country - or even out of country, due to shipping concerns, has been the nitromethane.
The absolute best I could come up with was finding a supplier from another EU country of a 40% w/w mix of nitromethane and whatever solvent I choose.
I therefore went for DCM - both useful (once distilled a couple times) and also doesn’t form an azeotrope with the NM. Correct?
My question is this, why is it I can’t just set my mantle at 45c or whatever the low bp of DCM is and wait for it to stop boiling and for it to stop coming over, then move my mantle up to 101c for the NM to come over?
Why, when I did my first distillation of the DCM/NM mix, does it pull DCM across all the way up to 100c? At which point you obviously swap out the collection flask and then redistil it…
I get that but why does it pull it across at all temps between the bp of DCM all the way up to and then past the BP of NM?
That’s the first part of the question, the second part is, is it quite common for nitromethane to turn yellow?
I was chatting to GPT and it said that NM is clear and if it has a yellow tinge it’s an impurity - now I know it’s not always correct regarding chem questions, however, I then googled it and sciencemadness came up with people talking about it…
I intend to, of course, re-distil the NM tomorrow and then basically proceed straight to my first Henry reaction…