I am wondering if it's possible to create a chloroform generator via an in situ haloform reaction between the generated hypochlorite in a brine
electrolysis cell.
I have tried this myself, I made up a conc. NaCl solution and added 50mL of ethanol to it after a few hours. Instantly the smell of bleach disappeared
and the solution turned slightly cloudy, it also smelled faintly of chloroform.
It's been 5 days now and the only change I've noticed is a fine white precipitate at the bottom of the cell, I assume this is
Na2CO3. I was initially confident because I assumed the cell would first need to generate enough chloroform to saturate the
water, then it would start forming at the bottom.
Any ideas on why this isn't working? I found a few pdf's on google that mention the preparation of iodoform and bromoform via a similar method,
however they mention that they neutralize any generated NaOH with CO2 gas.
[Edited on 13-7-2018 by Big Boss]ausnewbie - 12-7-2018 at 18:47
Hi BB,
Im sure I saw something on this quite recently - With a well resoned explaination as to why it was hard ( if not impossible) - The nuances escape me
at the moment. :-)
From what I've read on this it sounds like this fails because of side reactions that destroy the acetone/interfere with HClO- production before it can
further react to form chloroform.
If that's the case, maybe this can be done by keeping a constant excess of the hypochlorite, adding measured amounts of acetone each day.highjumptrust - 15-7-2018 at 07:12
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But, now a days i am facing problem with my V6 Engine. Will anyone suggest me how to customize the electric motor to improve its parformance?Big Boss - 15-7-2018 at 09:33
I gave up on this cell today, I lost track of how many days it's been running for but I decided to distill it just to see if I would recover anything.
About 100mL of liquid came over before 98C, it's a clear colour and it vaguely smells of fruit, when I give it a deeper smell I can feel it strongly
in the back of my throat. This could be mostly comprised of ethanol and water but there's a small oily yellow layer floating on the surface also. I
have no ideas, I'm going to further distill this to hopefully find its boiling point.
[Edited on 15-7-2018 by Big Boss]highjumptrust - 16-7-2018 at 07:56
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[Edited on 7-16-2018 by Bert]Big Boss - 16-7-2018 at 16:07
It appears I have formed 2 or more products from this electrolysis. Both of which remain a mystery.
They are both colourless liquids, the first has a bp of 98.7C and a density of 0.981. It isn't flammable.
The other, has a bp of 97C and a density of 0.871 but I don't think this is ethanol, it stayed at 97C and it smells really strange, a chemical fruit
smell. This one is flammable and burns like alcohol with a blue flame.
Their densities don't suggest they're chlorinated, safe to say this reaction doesn't produce chloroform but it's interesting nonetheless. The initial
electrolysis mixture, when distilled first changed colour from clear, to yellow, to red then finally a brown/black which suggests acetaldehyde formed
polymerized crap.Hunterman2244 - 17-7-2018 at 07:09
Could you add hydrogen peroxide to produce the hypochlorite ion? Before adding acetone obviously.Aqua-regia - 18-7-2018 at 00:46
This route is just wasting the time. It is exist some reference about this way? No. That reason the way no way.DavidJR - 18-7-2018 at 02:09
This route is just wasting the time. It is exist some reference about this way? No. That reason the way no way.
So we shouldn't experiment just because there's no literature on it? I knew going into this that there's a large chance it wouldn't work.
I researched it, noticed that people have mentioned it before and not given any results, so I decided to give it a try and report back.
It wasn't a waste of time, we now know it doesn't work Hunterman2244 - 26-7-2018 at 15:21
Could you add hydrogen peroxide to produce the hypochlorite ion? Before adding acetone obviously.
If you want to risk blowing your hand off, sure, why not.
How about using ethanol instead?Swinfi2 - 27-7-2018 at 09:49
I tried this too with 50-50 ethanol water and salt. Got a sickly sweet smelling yellow solution after 3 days electrolysis. From the first fraction I
got most of the smelly compounds (chloro-ethanol and chloro-ethanal?) Mostly ethanol in the second fraction and an awful sweet vinegar smell and
orange ppt in the flask (stopped distillation at 90C) the percipitate dissolved when HCl was added giving a yellow solution.
Anyway none of this seemed like chloroform so I'm just going to make NaClO first and then add ethanol. As my end goal is formic acid I'll add enough
NaOH to (hopefully) get 2eq's of NaCO2H then convert it to ethylformate for easy extraction. I'll make a post when I get somewhere with it.Big Boss - 28-7-2018 at 16:30
Your results sound similar to mine.
I'm going to repeat this again only this time I'm going to make a concentrated solution of hypochlorite first via electrolysis, then add the acetone
later.
The best method I can think of is make a saturated solution of NaCl, record the density, electrolyse it until the density doesn't decrease any
further, then increase the density to what was recorded earlier by adding NaCl. If that process is repeated a few times quite a lot of hypochlorite
should be generated
