Mol sieves! Here's the latest thoughts my brain generated on sodium methylate production:
Mix: 202ml MeOH, 40g NaOH, 100g mol sieves, stir for an appropriate amount of time with heating.Filter off the mol sieves. Theorethically you should be left with a 30% NaOMe solution in MeOH.
Now that I look at it, it's just like in
Patent US2451945
, only regenerate-able mol sieves are substituted for acetylene producing calcium carbide.
Suggestions ?
The ponderings that started it all are documented below for historical reasons:
Uhm, BTW: here's the $1
. 10
6 answer: methanol doesn't form an azeotrope with water. Here's the boiling-chart:
If we consider
Patent DE628023
I think it can be taken for granted that the percentage of water in the vapor-phase is low because the equilibrium lies heavily on the left (little water is generated by NaOH + MeOH
__> NaOMe + H
2O) thus the difference in boiling points of MeOH and MeOH/H
2O is small, a few °C if you're lucky. What big ass fractionation column did those crazy Germans think of ?
I think a much better approach would be to use a Soxhlet where you would be trying to extract the hell out of BaO/CaO or even better:
mol sieves (3Å).
Dynamic drying: solvent is filtered thru a chromatography column. 250g mol sieves are sufficient to dry 10L of solvent to a water content of 0.002% (20ppm). Column: 2.5 x 60cm (~1"x23"). Throughput: 3L/h. (transl from : www-oc.chemie.uni-regensburg.de/OCP/methoden/kap9.PDF )
Mol sieves have a capacity of ~20% their own weight, so you would need ~ 100g mol sieves for every 54g NaOMe.
Any objections ?
--psyloxy--