New answers tagged alcohols
1
The important thing ab out HCl gas in these reactions is that it is dry, there is no water present ruling out any hydrolytic pathways. This means that the first step to consider is a protonation by HCl as HCl can ionise in alcoholic solvent, followed by nucleophilic attack by the alcohol solvent. In the example shown the oxygen of the carbonyl is protonated ...
3
The question does not mention in what the ammonium cerium nitrate is dissolved in, but I guess it is water. If so, one expects that sufficiently large compounds that one wishes to test are not sufficiently soluble in water, such as decanol. Obviously, this is not entirely correct because disaccharides such as lactose do are soluble in water.
I expect a ...
5
The problem is that the alcohols themselves might be insoluble. Ethanol is soluble, yes, but as the alkyl chain length increases, the hydrophobic nature due to the chain starts dominating over whatever hydrophilicity the $\ce{-OH}$ group had been providing for lower homologues.
From source [1]:
.. any alcohol that is insoluble in the reagent might appear ...
3
To get a cloudy "precipitate", you need to dissolve the alcohol in the acid solution. Alcohols get less soluble in water as their chain length increases. By the time you pass 6 carbons, the alcohol itself is more or less insoluble. If it reacts along the interface, the chloride product would just mix into the alcohol layer, with no visible change.
1
Chemically, chalk is CaCO3. But blackboard chalk is mostly CaSO4.2H2O. If you want to mark something, the aim is to lay a coating of a certain (dry) thickness so as to be visible.
One way to reduce the odor is to reduce the amount of alcohol used by 1) making the paste richer in the chalk by a) just adding more chalk (but that might increase the viscosity ...
-1
Distilling your own spirits is fine and legal as long as you make no more than five gallons of finished ethanol. Anyways, you just need to throw out the first ounce or two of distillate if small scale, up two 4oz if large scale. That will be mostly methanol, other than that just be careful and God bless chemistry!
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