after big heating of the aldehyde and alanine, dark brownish/redish sticky goo remains smelling nothing like the aldehyde. Addition of h20 to the flask - the sticky stuff is not very h20 soluble, but upon heating, seems to take up enough of something to turn it a sun yello. Goop still coats flask.
Evaporation of the yello h20 and acetone crashing at the tail end results in lots of what appears to be alanine based on quantity/crystal reflectivity, smell. SWIM will decant crap from residual alanine before trying all this again.
goop in flask taunts swim, so he thinks ghetto like, and decides to try a 3 solvent extraction:
50:50 acetone and h20 is added to the remaining goop - it dissolves easily with minimal heat and swirling, turning bisolvent dark red. Addition of tetrachloroethylene and swirling with a little more heat resulted in a very dark red lower layer (tetra) with a yellowish white upper layer, which intensifies in color as low heat is applied for about 10 minutes. SWIM is hoping that this means that more of the hopeful PPA is in the h20 layer because the goop was thinned considerably. Will evap the top layer stuff and post results later.
any knowledge a bee wanna drop on a newbee would be nice.