I just triple-distilled rubbing alcohol so that it is pretty damn close to being pure. All I have been doing is lighting it, which, granted, is a load of fun, but my colleague and I were curious to know if anyone has any simple chemical reactions we can do with it. We have limited access to chemicals, so we are pretty much limited to household stuff. Thanks for educating us!
I suppose if you ingested it, you would probably get fairly ill, and damage your liver and kidneys, so I’d avoid doing that. You can preserve things in it, but I’d avoid distilling it again, due to the whole explosion issue. You can get 91% rubbing alcohol at the drugstore, that’s plenty flammable and toxic.
You could always do the whole “dead rat in a jar of alcohol” thing.
I’d reccomend against it though, the ladies don’t like that kind of stuff too much.
If isopropanol were in the habit of reacting with anything, it wouldn’t be used so often as a solvent. I can’t think of anything to do with it other than dissolving things and killing bacteria.
okay, we’ll just burn the rest in an alcohol lamp. Thanks though!
Its a very common solvent and cleaner in the Pharmaceutical industry too - we have buckets of IPA all over the place just for those puposes.
Google seems to show a lot of use of IPA as a percipitating agent - especially in micro/biochem. I haven’t read many sites - just the descriptions, but perhaps you can find a way to do a crude DNA sequence or something? I don’t know - I know chem is more your thing, but its an idea.
And this is likely beyond your household chemicals, but as an organic chemist, I think this looks interesting (with IPA used as a solvent):
http://www.unibas.ch/mdpi/ecsoc-4/a0056/a0056.htm
It’s a good house-hold cleaning agent as well.
In Brazil rubbing alcohol is sold at 98%, versus 40% in the U.S. (if I recall correctly.)
In addition to cleaning, we also used it to light the barbecue.
Make perfume with it. Pick a ton of flower petals from your favorite aromatic flower and soak them in the alcohol for about a week. Rose and Gardenia do quite well, but really pack them in there and seal the container. Put it in the fridge and forget about it. After a week, open and sniff. It should smell good. To make it stronger, remove the old petals and pack in new ones and let set for another week. Then remove the petals, tint with food coloring, slightly, and use.
They do that with vodka, so pure alcohol ought to be even better.
You could extract DNA .
I’m guessing, that if isopropyl alchohol is anything like it’s cousins ethanol and methanol, isopropyl alchohol forms an azeotrope with water, and what you have distilled is not as pure as you would like to believe. That is a bit of a guess though.
As for entirely useless reactions that could be done I have some ideas, but I must instruct you that without the proper equipment including: a vented hood, gloves and goggles, a waste disposal plan, proper glassware, and a fire control protocol, these experiments should not be done. In other words, since based on your question you know nothing about chemistry, do not do them.
Refluxing (Boiling into a condenser with cooled water running through it so that it condenses back into the reaction vessel (there goes that glassware thing)) while dropwise adding household bleach will make acetone. Believe me it is alot cheaper at the store.
Refluxing with vinigar in acid would get isopropyl acetate, though not very well and I don’t know how you would separate the product from the mixture as isopropyl alchohol and isopropyl acetate have nearly identical boiling boints.
Basically, Isopropyl alchohol is fairly unreactive, and that is a good thing.
That’s all I can think of. Chances are, without anty experience, and without any equipment, you would not be successful. The difficulty being that both your products and your reactants are liquids with fairly close b.p. and the only method to separate them would be distillation. I have not given you the quantities nor some of the nuances of the reagents because I am not certain what the moderators would think if I wrote out a procedure for you. As it is, the reactions will go, but not very well.
Why not just stick to extracting purple indicator from red cabage and mixing it with vinigar to make it change color. At least then you can see that something has happned. It’s a great way to pick up women you know.
Christopher
Isopropyl alcohol, anhydrous, 99.953%, is an excellent cleaning solvent for electronic gadgets (e.g. contact switches). I have a liter of the stuff in my workshop…I use it frequently.
you can make hash with it