Thanks Hiesenberg!

You know if one could acquire the Mol Sieves which is not that hard, you could use the first method quoted in conjunction with Organikums technique. As in; prepare a long thin vessel and fill to 1/3 with NaOH pellets, fill with ethanol. Organikum states that a visible phase separation occurs after about half an hour, you could then just stir in enough mol sieves to absorb that water instead of separating it.

That's true, with the biodiesel fashion, technical 30% sodium methoxide is not difficult to source.

The beauty of Organikum's method, if it works, is that it can be easily upschaled to a clandustrial level. You take a 55 gallon drum and solder a metal cone at the bottom, put a faucet down there, another at 1/4 of the body, a cloth or metal mesh filter at each would prevent solid NaOH to escape, and stick a mechanical stirrer at the lid. Knowing the total volume of the system, you can fill it now up to 4/5 of it. Add 1/3 of the effective capacity of the same of sodium hydroxide prills, then you fill it with azeotropical EtOH, iPrOH, or whatever, put the lid and stir for an hour, then let it sit for some hours, and decant the alcohol + alkoxide through the 1/4 faucet and the water, alcohol, hydroxide mixture through the bottom faucet. If you know the volume of each solution, you can calculate the ammount of consumed NaOH taking small aliquots and titrating with HCl, then you add the calculated ammount of NaOH and fresh alcohol and the procedure starts again. With the alcoholic alkoxide, you can distill pure ethanol from it (witch can be recycled) and obtain solid alkoxide, or distill ethanol until you have a NaOH solution of the concentration you want, or if you are on a hurry, add a shitload of CaCl2 dryed acetone to precipitate solid alkoxide witch can be filtered. With the residual water, alcohol and hydroxide mixture, you can distill ethanol and recycle it, if you think it's worth it.

I love it when the simple procedures work out! The whole sepfunnel + NaOH method is sound. After reading some hive threads It was performed. after ~20hrs 150mls of the viscous ethanol was distilled and stopped when 80mls had been collected. Solids were observed in the flask. Used 150ml dry acetone to precipitate additional alkoxides. Vac filtered and washed with 3ml kerosene. Yielded 22g slightly wet white solids. This would work better with pre-dried ethanol of course. Any ideas on tests etc to run so the presence of sodium ethoxide can be confirmed?



Important Hive threads:
http://pzorg.110mb.com/hiveboard/newbee/000511796.html
http://pzorg.110mb.com/hiveboard/novel/000257912.html

Sodium ethoxide from the sep funnel method is 1) a very very dilute solution (unless excess EtOH is distilled of course) 2) contaminated with a considerable amount of NaOH. 10mls of this dried treated ethanol/ethoxide was withdrawn from the top using a pipette, equal vol ethyl acetate was added and sodium acetate precipitated within 10mins indicating the ester has been hydrolyzed. A temperature of ~60c and good stirring is required to make an ethoxide solution of any half decent concentration. Next trial will involve xylene and toluene azeotropes. Can anyone think why a small amount of sodium acetate would interfere with a claisen condensation?

you might find that price goes down so does purity

i have always found it good habit to distill or recystalize ur salts and solvents if u are at all iffy on purity