Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Nitroethane route

draculic acid69 - 5-3-2023 at 05:27

Not sure if this is a new synth or not but just seen a vid where a guy uses propionate salts+ nitrite in an electrolisys cell yeilding nitroethane.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6fqJUpjsXd4

Ephraim_Bane - 5-3-2023 at 16:34

This guy has no characterization of his product and claims "it worked." He also asked ChatGPT for a synthesis, which absolutely will not work. ChatGPT is a chatbot, designed to create plausible-sounding answers, not an actual knowledge base. Despite that, iirc I've seen discussion of a similar route with proprionate(?) salts and nitrite somewhere.

BromicAcid - 5-3-2023 at 17:59

ChatGPT is pretty terrible at complex chemistry but does reasonable at explaining basic concepts. We've been trialing SYNTHIA for a few years now and it's pretty good to find reliable routes though it's still up to the chemists to apply their skill set figuring out the nuances.

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/services/software-and-dig...


draculic acid69 - 6-3-2023 at 00:38

He did mention he had to tweek the procedure to optimise it otherwise it would have yeilded less than a ml. If he actually got 10ml of nitroethane from 18g prop salt then
you have to admit its a very viable route. Any other nitroethane routes get way less at best for 5x the effort.

[Edited on 6-3-2023 by draculic acid69]

Mateo_swe - 6-3-2023 at 02:27

Maybe you can try the procedure on a small scale and try verify that the product truly is nitroethane and yields.
Nitroethane is rather hard to get so a viable route is intresting if it works.

Texium - 6-3-2023 at 09:59

Quote: Originally posted by draculic acid69  
you have to admit its a very viable route. Any other nitroethane routes get way less at best for 5x the effort.
Don’t have to admit anything when there’s no characterization of the product and the source of the procedure is an AI chatbot. Might as well piss in a vial and call it nitroethane if that’s the level of evidence you’re willing to accept.

clearly_not_atara - 6-3-2023 at 16:41

Claims by early workers in this field to have effected anodic syntheses of alkyl halides and nitroalkanes, by electrolysis of mixtures of carboxylates and either inorganic halides or nitrites respectively, have not been substantiated in subsequent investigations. Of these attempted crossing reactions those with salts of fatty acids and sodium nitrate have been studied most thoroughly (for review see ref. 114). A typical example is the electrolysis of a propionate-nitrate mixture which yields a variety of products including ethyl nitrate, n-butyl nitrate, and the dinitrates of ethylene glycol and butane-1,4-diol. The formation of derivatives with the same number of carbon atoms as the Kolbe product is particularly noteworthy.

Sorry, no. But maybe a useful synthesis of 1,4-butanediol? Careful with those alkyl nitrates!

Attachment: weedon1952.pdf (1.4MB)
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tyro - 9-3-2023 at 20:15

Funny, I posted on this scheme recently.

https://www.sciencemadness.org/whisper/viewthread.php?tid=14...

The source that Weedon references is:

ELECTROCHEMICAL EXPERIMENTS WITH VARIOUS ORGANIC ACIDS.
Fr. Fichter 1939 Trans. Electrochem. Soc. 75 309
DOI 10.1149/1.3498380

Pretty neat read!

Tsjerk - 10-3-2023 at 10:59

Quote: Originally posted by draculic acid69  
Not sure if this is a new synth or not but just seen a vid where a guy uses propionate salts+ nitrite in an electrolisys cell yeilding nitroethane.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6fqJUpjsXd4


You guide students right?

I really hope you don't grade them like you judge YouTube shit.