Precipitation, when it doesn’t mean rain and snow, means roughly the opposite of dissolving. It means taking a solution, and persuading the interesting thing to come back out of solution and be a solid. We already covered rotary evaporation, which is one way of doing...
Distillation has a lot in common with reflux, except that instead of letting the condensate drip back down into the original mixture, you change the layout a bit and collect it into a second flask. Distillation is the usual method of making spirits from weaker...
As a general rule, heating a reaction up makes it go faster. Many reactions work better if you boil the solvent they’re happening in. Actually, many reactions happen fastest of all in the vapour that comes off the boiling solvent. The reaction takes place in...
Consider this: You’ve got a flask of liquid. In the flask is some solvent, and dissolved in it (along with probably some leftover bits and pieces of raw material that you don’t care about) is your product. How do you get the product out? You...
How do you make things cold? This isn’t an academic question. Quite a lot of reactions, some of them very ordinary lab procedures, put out heat. You don’t want to burn yourself or your worktop on scalding hot glass because your mixture is hot, and...
So, as mentioned, filtration is really slow. Sufficiently so that in reality, it’s hardly ever done that way. Unless there’s a compelling reason not to subject your mixture to anything more aggressive than gravity, you use a related, but more complicated bit of kit, and...
You all know what a filter is. It’s that thing you make coffee with. It’s a way of seperating solid particles from liquids. A sieve is a filter, if not a very fine one. A teabag is a filter with leaves inside. It is one...
So here we are, day one, and first things should come first. Let’s talk about measurement. Measuring out your reactants is fairly vital to doing chemistry. You can’t get very far if you don’t know what you’ve got and how much of it. So you...
Welcome, welcome, one and all, to Advent 2013. Advent Knowledge got its start a few years ago, and its website in 2012. We’ve been getting bigger and more exciting every year, and this year it’s your turn. Yes, you, over there. I’m looking at you....
Well, it’s the 24th of December, the last day of Advent. We’ve looked at some of the fundamentals of organic chemistry: bonds, functional groups, resonance (“shuffling electrons around”), aromaticity, chirality, conformation (shape) and stability, along with some other aspects of chemistry like ionic bonds and...
