Organic Chemistry!
Jul. 17th, 2006 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dxmachinaHi. My name is DX, and I'm an organic chemistry geek...
I rarely get to stretch my chemistry legs anymore, at least not in any way that's interesting to me, so I really have come to enjoy reading the adventures of someone whose chemistry interests seem to parallel my own. The most recent entry especially caught my eye, because he talks about a trick I used to use in the lab:
I had a need for some anhydrous HCl and couldn’t find the Aldrich 2M/Et2O solution that floats around. Someone gave me a tip on how to make your own dry HCl solution in the alcoholic solvent of your choice, so I thought I’d pass it along: Add acetyl chloride to methanol or ethanol, producing 1 equivalent of HCl + methyl/ethyl acetate. The reaction is instantaneous. Perfect for crystallizing amines!
It's all great fun to read about, and I don't have to clean anything in Chromerge afterwards. I'd like to think that had blogs existed back when I was in grad school, I might have produced something similar, but since my grad school career was more about playing softball and golf than doing, you know, research, probably not. OTOH, maybe it would've focused my attention better upon the matter at hand. Le sigh...
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ION, I just got a piece of junk mail at work, one of those card decks for industrial products that would normally go right in the trash, except that the top card caught my eye. It's for industrial-sized ceiling fans. That's not made me hesitate. What caught my eye was that the company is called Big Ass Fans.
I rarely get to stretch my chemistry legs anymore, at least not in any way that's interesting to me, so I really have come to enjoy reading the adventures of someone whose chemistry interests seem to parallel my own. The most recent entry especially caught my eye, because he talks about a trick I used to use in the lab:
I had a need for some anhydrous HCl and couldn’t find the Aldrich 2M/Et2O solution that floats around. Someone gave me a tip on how to make your own dry HCl solution in the alcoholic solvent of your choice, so I thought I’d pass it along: Add acetyl chloride to methanol or ethanol, producing 1 equivalent of HCl + methyl/ethyl acetate. The reaction is instantaneous. Perfect for crystallizing amines!
It's all great fun to read about, and I don't have to clean anything in Chromerge afterwards. I'd like to think that had blogs existed back when I was in grad school, I might have produced something similar, but since my grad school career was more about playing softball and golf than doing, you know, research, probably not. OTOH, maybe it would've focused my attention better upon the matter at hand. Le sigh...
---
ION, I just got a piece of junk mail at work, one of those card decks for industrial products that would normally go right in the trash, except that the top card caught my eye. It's for industrial-sized ceiling fans. That's not made me hesitate. What caught my eye was that the company is called Big Ass Fans.
