shit distillation

[grandyOse]

I had a mixture of water, denatured ethanol, sulfuric acid, isopropanol, and a little sucrose with a trace of a slightly soluable inorganic salt and an even smaller amount of various organic solids, neither of which will melt at the temperatures described. I used a retort with a mercury kitchen thermometer and distilled over alcohols between 70 and 85 degrees. Then I distilled over some water at 95 (damned cheap thermometers) which was slightly acidic. At the end of this distillation, the only reaction in the vessel was when some liquids refluxed back into the mixture. Can I be reasonably sure that I was able to remove at least 98% of the alcohol? It's important that I get rid of most of the alcohol, but I really don't want to raise the mixture much above 100, and would prefer to leave a little water in the solution. Using cheap papers, the ph is about 2. I should have paid closer attention to the volumes, but I didn't really know the concentration of acid anyway (about 60%, I'd guess).

[John Ashcroft]

Your post: I had a mixture of water, denatured ethanol, sulfuric acid, isopropanol, and a little sucrose with a trace of a slightly soluable inorganic salt and an even smaller amount of various organic solids, neither of which will melt at the temperatures described.

Your signature: WTF?

And that is my reply.

[grandyOse]

Is it the NEITHER that confounds you? neither the organic solids nor inorganic salt will melt at less then 110C.

The sentence structure is poor, I admit, but we all know that the water, alcohols, and acid are liquid at STP.

[frogfot]

Grandy, we're not following your intentions... what you wanna do.
If you wanna take away all traces of alcohol from your goo while keeping temp not higher than 100*C, then heat it in water-bath for longer times.