Sciencemadness Discussion Board - Any Ideas?

Any Ideas?

TheNerdyFarmer - 3-6-2017 at 13:45

It has recently come to my attention that I have a lot of chemicals that I have not used for some time due to lack of essential chemicals. Plus sometimes I get bored and I have a semi-good stocked lab that I should be using.

. Anyway, I am going to give a list of chemical reagents that I have and If any of you have any ideas of something cool to make with them, or essential chemicals, please do tell.

Chemicals:
170ml glycerin.
About 70g magnesium sulfate.
About 6g pure cobalt metal powder
15g sodium nitrate
About 10g phthalimide.
<100g Urea
<20g alumina
1kg copper sulfate
1kg potassium hydroxide
1kg sodium hydroxide
30g hydrazine sulfate
100g ammonium dichromate
200g potassium dichromate
200g potassium iodide
100g ornithine hydrochloride
30g phthalic anhydride
1lb citric acid
<1lb boric acid
<1lb Sodium tetraborate
<300g potassium bisulfate
600g sodium bisulfate
3g iodine
about 100g acetylsalicylic acid
1L glacial acetic acid
1 gallon hydrochloric acid 33%
<1lb potassium nitrate
<3lb cyanuric acid
about 30ml elemental mercury
sulfuric acid drain cleaner
can generate chlorine gas if necessary

Solvents:

1 gallon acetone
1/2 gallon toluene
350ml methanol (can easily get more if necessary)
Isopropyl alcohol
tetrachloroethylene.

I also have all of the basic household chems aswell. (i.e. 3% H2O2 solution, NaCl, NaHCO3, stuff like that.)
It would be greatly appreciated if you all could name some either fun to make or useful (or both

) chemicals that would be good to have. Some "proof of concept" reactions would be great too. Thanks in advance!

A Halogenated Substance - 3-6-2017 at 14:39

You could use your glycerol and citric acid to make an ester polymer if you've haven't tried it before.

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=72992#...

I used quite a large excess of glycerol when I tried doing this and my product was quite... goopy. Even with boiling down, it remained liquid yet extremely viscous, so I would be interested if an excess of citric acid would fix that.

Alice - 4-6-2017 at 02:43

Quote: Originally posted by TheNerdyFarmer

1kg copper sulfate

If it isn't already anhydrous you could dry it in order to obtain a drying agent and an indicator for water presence.

Quote:

6g pure cobalt metal powder

Making Co(NO3)2, CoCl2, CoCO3, and Co(acac)3.

j_sum1 - 4-6-2017 at 05:14

There is nothing much in your list that I think is particularly strange or unusable. Most have multiple uses depending on what you are interested in.

Let me comment on a few:

170ml glycerin.
For me, this is something easy to come by. If I am honest my most common use for it is lighting thermites with permanganate. And 170mL is not really a lot. It is a solvent for some things. There are a few synths possible but I am not getting past the mental blank at the moment.

About 70g magnesium sulfate.
Again, this is a trivial amount of a really common reagent. Dehydrate it and use if for drying in work-ups.

About 6g pure cobalt metal powder
Cobalt has some cool properties. Notably, the 2+ ion forms some intriguing complexes. It can also act as a reasonable catalyst. A small amount of CoCl2 in some bleach will evolve O2 gas. So if you don't have a use for the metal you can dissolve it in some acid and have a different kind of fun.

15g sodium nitrate
I don't know if this is enough to do much. Fertilise your pot plants.

About 10g phthalimide.
Outside of my zone here. But I a sure that it has some good uses. 10g is not much. It might fit in an envelope and you could mail it to someone. Nah. Maybe it is not wise to send it that way.

<100g Urea
Make a deep eutectic solvent. Or make some hydrazine sulfate. It's a good exercise and not actually too difficult.Urea nitrate is also possible. Do a quick search -- there are enough people who wish they could get hold of urea easily.

<20g alumina
What form? What grade? It might be a good substrate for a catalyst.

1kg copper sulfate
To my thinking, this is the go-to copper salt. It is always good to have some around. A lot of mine got used to make sulfuric acid in the days before I had a supply of the stuff. There are a lot of things you can do with electrolysis and copper plating.

1kg potassium hydroxide
Another lab standard. If you feel a need to use it up quickly, make some liquid soap. Or better yet, some potassium metal.

1kg sodium hydroxide
How is it you have a kilo of this and aren't using it all the time? Mine gets used for neutralising, converting acids to sodium salts, precipitating many metal ions as hydroxides so that I can recover them and prevent them from going down the waterways. Or make a Castaner cell and get some sodium. Or make a sodium/MgO drying agent via thermite with magnesium.

30g hydrazine sulfate
Great reducing agent. I have heard that you can create a nice copper mirror with a Cu2+ solution and hydrazine. I am yet to try it. With yoru copper sulfate and this stuff it seems like you have the beginnings of a good project to work out the optimum conditions and develop a great procedure. Convert your urea when you run out.

100g ammonium dichromate
200g potassium dichromate
This has useful oxidiser written all over it. The ammonium salt decomposes to Cr2O3 when heated -- this is the classic kids' volcano experiment. But it is wasteful. Fresh Cr2O3 can be reclaimed and converted back to dichromate by fusing with a nitrate. Sodium dichromate has the edge over potassium in some situations in that it is about 20 times more soluble. (Guessw ho found out this the hard way!)

200g potassium iodide
Do you know how expensive this stuff can be? This is a great stock of iodine atoms. Make I2 whenever you need to. From there you have a lot of organic synths available. Make some iodoform. Make some interhalides. Make a KI3 solution and test for starch. Iodometric titrations are useful. You want to hold onto this stuff. (As an aside, I reclaim my iodine whenever I can.)

100g ornithine hydrochloride
Um. I dunno. But there is no harm in having a play with it. If you are interested in amino acids then there is bound to be something that you could investigate with it. My last experiment with amino acids (hydrolysed animal protein -- so mixed AAs) was to stir it in with some fructose and heat to demonstrate the Maillard reaction. You might use it as a starting point to learn about optical isomers. I would assume that you have L ornithine. But maybe you have a racemic mixture.

30g phthalic anhydride
Make your own phenolphthalein. I dunno. It has other uses too. But you don't have a great deal of it.

1lb citric acid
Make lemonade? It's an interesting organic acid. You could do some esterification reactions. It can be used as a reducer. Mix with sugar and sodium bicarbonate and you have sherbet.

<1lb boric acid
Heat up in a tin can and make B2O3. Crush that up to a powder. Then thermite with Mg to get elemental boron. Or you could kill cockroaches. Boric acid is your doorway to boron in organic chemistry. Great if you lie green flames. I bet it has some uses in fireworks also.

<1lb Sodium tetraborate
Flux for any time you are melting a metal in a crucible. If you didn't already have boric acid you could make some by making a solution (preferably warm) and crashing out H3BO3 with hydrochloric acid. Borax has traditionally had heaps of uses. If you have some polyvinyl alcohol or PVA glue it can be used for cross-linking and you get an interesting slime or rubbery material. I don't know how useful this is but it is easy and interesting to do.

<300g potassium bisulfate
Most people throw this out since it is a byproduct of making nitric acid. But it can be useful.
600g sodium bisulfate
Treat these as a cheap solid substitute for sulfuric acid. They won't do everything that H2SO4 can but they are not bad to have around. Good for neutralising stuff if nothing else.

about 100g acetylsalicylic acid
Decarboxylate to get salicylic acid. Make oil of wintergreen or other interesting esters. Make phenol.

1L glacial acetic acid
Grow some copper acetate crystals. They are really pretty and with this much GAA you could get some big ones over time. GAA is good as a solvent occasionally and is a basic in organic syntheses. Make some acetic anhydride. (or not if you don't have a use for it. It is a schedule 1 precursor.) Acetic acid is surprisingly good at dissolving some metals and oxides. Slower than the strong acids but sometimes it works when some strong acids don't. Acetates are usually very soluble which has its uses. And they tend to decompose at relatively low heat leaving a nice oxide.

1 gallon hydrochloric acid 33%
Another lab standard. I am surprised it is not in constant use.

<1lb potassium nitrate
Distillation of nitric acid is something everyone should do at least once. If you have not done it then do the research and give it a go. Or fertilise your lawn and find another hobby.

<3lb cyanuric acid
I bought some of this when I was investigating analogues of the copper sodium dichloroisocyanurate complexes. I still have 2998 grams left. I need to do some reading but I think there is a route to some interesting nitrogen compounds beginning with this stuff. Cyanates, thiocyanates, that kind of thing. It is t really much of an acid and not incredibly soluble. But it is bound to have some uses beyond stabilising the chlorine in your swimming pool.

about 30ml elemental mercury
If you are not interested in toxic inorganic chemistry then keep it in a nice container and have it looking cool. Mercury is that kind of thing. I would keep mercury well away from any organic chemistry including side reactions with body parts.

sulfuric acid drain cleaner
Clean it up with hydrogen peroxide if needed. If you live where this is available then you use it as your standard go-to acid for whatever you are doing. The fact that it is not volatile and does not rust out your shed gives it the edge over HCl in most applications.

ninhydric1 - 4-6-2017 at 09:12

You could try synthesizing anthranilic acid from the phthalic anhydride, assuming you have ammonia of course. But it is a DEA List I chemical so do it at your own risk :/. You could always make methyl anthranilate from it, which is where artificial grape flavoring comes from.

You could also make Schweizer's reagent by reacting copper(II) sulfate with sodium hydroxide then reacting the precipitated copper(II) hydroxide with ammonia (assuming you have ammonia) to form the tetraaminecopper(II) dihydroxide complex, which is Schweizer's reagent. Dissolve forms of cellulose such as paper, and drop/pour the cellulose solution in some acid to produce rayon (or something similar to rayon).

You seem to have a whole lot of potassium iodide, so you could do the iodine clock reaction: Solution A being Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) and potassium iodide (iodine tincture can be substituted), and Solution B being cornstarch and 3% hydrogen peroxide. I'm not completely sure what are the ideal amounts of each reagent, so some research is needed.

Use the methanol to make formaldehyde by heating a piece of copper wire and repeatedly dunking the wire into the methanol until desired concentration is reached. Formaldehyde (or methanal) is a very useful aldehyde, so it shouldn't be hard finding any uses for it.

If you have bleach, react it with acetone through the haloform reaction to prepare chloroform. I'm pretty sure NileRed has a video about it, so I won't get into too many details.

There are probably many more, but that's all I can think of.

[Edited on 6-4-2017 by ninhydric1]

TheNerdyFarmer - 4-6-2017 at 18:39

Thank you all for the ideas. J_sum, it's not that I dont use some of my chemicals on a regular basis, I was more or less posting this to get a better idea of some different things to do with them. Thank you for all your suggestions. Will probably try that copper mirror one, sounds like fun.

Nihydric, I may try that formaldehyde from methanol thing. But I have a question, wouldn't the formaldehyde be further oxidised by the copper metal to formic acid?

[Edited on 5-6-2017 by TheNerdyFarmer]

j_sum1 - 4-6-2017 at 18:54

TBH, much of my reason for posting was to find out how much I have learned over the past three years.
Someone posts a list of reagents and I can figure out what they all are, know something of their physical and chemical properties and what can be done with them. It was a good exercise for me.

It seems to me that this is the foundation for a pretty well-stocked inorganic home lab. And I realise that your question was more along the lines of "What else can I add to this to make a decent project out of it?" So my reply was slightly off topic. But hopefully there is something there that is useful.

My intention is to do the copper mirror in an ampoule for the element collection. And after thinking about it, it might not be a bad way of displaying other metals. My current interest is in bismuth mirrors for a similar but related use. I have found mention of them in passing -- along with arsenic and antimony mirrors. But no really good procedure as yet.

ninhydric1 - 4-6-2017 at 20:12

@TheNerdyFarmer

It seems like the copper metal dunking method is the dangerous way (I would not want to deal with flaming, vaporized methanol) and it probably will take a substantial amount of time and effort, so it's probably more for demonstration. Cooling precautions would need to be taken. Also, I'm not sure if it will oxidize all the way to formic acid, but IIRC strong oxidizers such as KMnO4 can.

Here's the thread I'm looking at:
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=132&am...

I don't really think that method is very viable to obtain a large amount of formaldehyde :/, but it is interesting.

Magpie - 5-6-2017 at 16:03

Quote: Originally posted by ninhydric1

You could try synthesizing anthranilic acid from the phthalic anhydride, assuming you have ammonia of course. But it is a DEA List I chemical so do it at your own risk :/. You could always make methyl anthranilate from it, which is where artificial grape flavoring comes from.

I find this ironic that OTC goose repellent and grape flavoring are esters of this forbidden acid. This relationship is not uncommon, however.

https://www.nixalite.com/product/ecobird-fogging-repellent

j_sum1 - 5-6-2017 at 17:27

Ok. I have never heard of goose repellant before. I guess it is used at airports.
What is the mechanism behind its use? Does it create a visual fog or is it an unpleasant odour for the birds -- or what?

Magpie - 5-6-2017 at 18:20

In the USA we have a lot of Canada Geese. These beautiful birds, protected by law, feed on the grass in city parks and golf courses. This makes them a pest due to their plentiful droppings. This repellent, also sold as "liquid fence," supposedly prevents them from inhabiting these grassy areas. My understanding is that it is sprayed on the grass.

Here's the reason:

http://www.flockfighters.com/products_MA.html

[Edited on 6-6-2017 by Magpie]

[Edited on 6-6-2017 by Magpie]

[Edited on 6-6-2017 by Magpie]

[Edited on 6-6-2017 by Magpie]

j_sum1 - 5-6-2017 at 19:34

Interesting. Stimulation of nerves in the beak so they don't want to be there.
And everyone (everything) else just gets to smell something vaguely grape-like.