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purifying MXE with non anhydrous acetone??

T

T9358

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is this possible, or do you have to use anhydrous acetone?? help would be greatly appreciated. are there other ways of purifying with solvents that can be bought a local stores- no sources needed
 
The water in the acetone will dissolve your MXE and leave you with a sticky mess. Needs to be as anhydrous as you can get it.
 
I found methanol was really good for cleaning mine. Anyhdrous is great but often acetone from lab suppliers is plenty dry enough already.
 
You can dry your non-anhydrous acetone with a desiccant... as long as it is close to pure and not like only 90% or something.
 
^Depends what the desiccant, something like magnesium sulfate or other anhydrous salts you just dump in stir it around and let it settle before filtering it off
 
sekio said:
The water in the acetone will dissolve your MXE and leave you with a sticky mess. Needs to be as anhydrous as you can get it.
Click to expand...
Wouldn't he have to do it under exclusion of air even in order for the acetone not to suck up humidity within seconds after opening it? I've never tried this with MXE, but I know I've never had problems yielding amphetamine salts in regular acetone with a few percent of water in it. They often are a bit sticky right after they are filtered out though.

Btw I think Magnesium Sulfate isn't sufficient if you want to dry acetone. Don't quote me on that though...
 
It does readily re-hydrate over time, but it's not quite *that* quick. Mag sulfate is fine for these purposes too.
 
"From 'Purification of Laboratory Chemicals':

It can be dried with anhydrous CaSO4, K2CO3 or type 4A Linde molecular sieves, and then distd. Silica gel and alumina, or mildly acidic or basic dessicants cause acetone to undergo the aldol condensation, so that its water content is increased by passage through these reagents. This also occurs to some extent when P2O5 or sodium Amalgam is used. Anhydrous MgSO4 is an inefficient drying agent, and CaCl2 forms an addition compound. Drierite (anhydrous CaSO4) offers he minimum acid and base catalysis of aldol formation and is the recommended drying agent for this solvent."

So calcium sulphate seems to be the way to go hear unless you have the chance to use molecular sieves.
 
Don't use molecular sieves for acetone!!!!! They're weakly basic and will make it go aldol!

It's deceptive. You can dry acetone over the short term (hours) with mol-sieves but if you store it for anything longer than about half a day you'll notice the smell and color starts to go off, and if you're using it as a solvent for e.g. chromatography, mysterious new compounds start to appear.
 
I wasn't going to bother mentioning it but yeah, acetone can't be stored with mol. sieves. This is a good explanation for the curious.
 
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