I am not chemist, however I am interested in science and know some basics. So I have real life problem to solve and I hope there will be some people interested to help me or at least understand more how chemistry works. Anyway I would appreciate any answer.
So I have unfortunate spill of diesel addtive VIF (czech republic product). Composition is like this from the site(some translations maybe wrong):
Name - % in mixture
2-ethylhexyl nitrate - 50-100
solvent naphtha light - <5
solvent naphtha hard - <5
2,6-Di-tert-butylphenol - <5
1,2,4-Trimethylbenzene - <2.5
1,3,5-trimethylbenzen - <2.5
So I spilled this stuff in my car's trunk. Don't ask how it was, this is a fact and I cannot revert it back. It was a canister with it, so I spilled around 2 litres of it. I noticed it only after a day.
I took out the rug from the trunk and it was full of this liquid. The rug is textile. I tried to take it out with water and actually it was kind of eager to go out with water. It was lot of it, and I didn't want to do it manually. I cleaned my hands with soap and no smell was left on my hands after washing them, so I assumed I can clean the rug in the washing machine. Which was probably the worst mistake.
So instead of it being cleaned, I have
Rug that smell like the worse mechanical/technical smell in the world, however with no stains.
Washing machine which not only smells worse, but it gives this smell to anything that was washed in the machine and the smell is kind of concentrated.
So I have several questions on what can give this smell? Which component exactly? I wrote to the manufacturer with this questions, but they only told me I can try some solvent like technical petrol. But it was not an answer to the question "how to get rid of the smell"
So after reading some threads, everybody advising activated charcoal as best deodorizer. I bought a kilo of it, and put around 200 grams to the washing machine for like 20 hours, and after that I didn't notice any change in the smell.
So the questions is: what is the formula for absorption with activated carbon? How to calculate how much of it I need to deodorize well? Will it deodorize at all? Maybe activate carbon pores are too small for the molecules or etc?