1/09/2007

mystery flask!

Tonight, I bring you pictures! Bonus points if you can guess what's in the flask before I post it tomorrow! [1]

Side view of the mystery flask


Top view

As an added bonus, and because the muppet bloggers at Two-Headed Chemical Mayhem have been quiet lately, the mystery flask comes with CORK RING!

[1] Yeah, I'd do this tonight, but I definitely left the reference in the lab. Oops!

15 comments:

Chemgeek said...

Ooooo...Pretty!!! I like the purple. I've seen stuff like this before, but I'm not sure what this is.

The white crystals look similar to something growing on a bottle of triethylamine in my stockroom. I know what is growing on my bottle of TEA, I just don't know where the H+ is coming from.

Anonymous said...

Purple stuff = a porphyrin or phthalocyanine

White stuff = oxidized (excess) aldehyde starting material?

Mike said...

Strawberry jam, yeah!

synthetic environment said...

Some product of an uncontrollable chlorination reaction with POCl3 and catalytic N,N-dimethylaniline.

Excimer said...

paul- question: most of the phthalocyanines i've worked with were green, but they had bulky groups on them to reduce aggregation. is regular phthalocyanine purple?

also i bet it's NIS that decomposed

Ψ*Ψ said...

It's really more reddish-violet than purple, if that helps...also, no aldehyde in or out. No chlorine, either. And it's not a porphyrin or phthalocyanine...keep guessing!
I've seen sugar crystallize out of strawberry jam before, but not into needles like that!

Anonymous said...

I have seen ArOMe demethylations run in molten neat pyridine hydrochloride that looked a lot like the stuff in the picture (the brownish stuff is the caramelized product with excess of solidified py.HCl, the white needles on top is sublimated py.HCl)

Ψ*Ψ said...

AHA! Molten solvent! Getting closer!

Chemgeek said...

some ionic liquid??

Ψ*Ψ said...

Nothing of the sort!

Anonymous said...

excimer...you're right. i've worked extensively with porphyrins but not phthalocyanines. that said, i've seen porphyrins range from purple to greenish (in the presence of acid)

my new guess:

purple = C60

white = some malonic ester derivative (??)

Ψ*Ψ said...

Still wrong :)

Anonymous said...

I am hesitant to accept this as molten imidazole. The color is strange. Unless the white stuff is the imidazole and the color is someething else

I've managed to distill imidazole at about 190 deg C under vacuum though. It was strange.

Ψ*Ψ said...

I'm pretty sure the white stuff is the imidazole. It always crystallizes into white needles at the top of the flask, and I'm not sure why. The reddish stuff is definitely the product. Probably I should mention that the imidazole is no longer molten in the photo, as the reaction has cooled down.

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