Sciencemadness Discussion Board - Project ideas?

Project ideas?

mnick12 - 8-11-2010 at 19:46

Well every year our school has something called "project week", essentialy you get one week off in late december to work on a project of your choice approved by your teacher. Once you finish your project you are to create a posterboard with lots of big numbers and pretty colors so all the kiddies can enjoy it. Also during the "project week" you are supposed to work all day everyday.

Last year I did a project on the effectiveness of sulfuric acid as a catalyst in simple esterifications. That was fun and refluxing things is a great way to kill time, but this year I would like to take on something a little more challenging. My origonal idea was a marx-generator, but that would take an hr to make not a week. So I would like to do something in chemistry preferably organic, any ideas? Now let me narrow that down. I would prefer something relatively simply, not some obscure alkaloid total synthesis. But I would also like for the synthesis to have a few challenges. Not only that I would like the project to appeal to the audience. So far I was thinking zingerone,rassbery ketone, and similar projects.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Jor - 8-11-2010 at 21:04

What i always found interesting if the chlorination of CHCl3 to CCl4 is practical. You could try to investigate whether bubbling in chlorine in boiling chloroform under UV-irradiation under long periods of time will yield much CCl4. This is not practical at home, at least for me and most of us, due to the huge amount of chlorine you need, and the apparatus.

You could investigate polyaniline and it's dericatives, it's not very complicated chemistry. Just look in my topic about it and you'll find some useful info and references.
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?action=pri...

A project I am currently doing experiments on:
You could investigate the following, if you can extract pure copper from it's alloys via the following method:
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/3961028/fulltext.html
Copper metal dissolves in copper sulfate solution containing acetonitril (usually 20-50%), because Cu(I) forms a stable complex with it. After filtering, when you boil away the acetonitril you can quantitively precitipate the copper again, as a fine pure powder (use inert atmosphere when extracting as O2 oxidises Cu(I)). You could investigate what other metals are extracted and precitipated using this method, wich are for example silver and arsenic, but many other metals are not extracted at all.

Influence on the rate of dissolution of aluminium in HCl, catalysed by metal-chloro complexes. We did quite a lot of experimenting on dutch forum on this. For example chloro-complexes of Cu(II) strongly catalyse the dissolution of Al in HCl, but so do AuCl4(-), AgCl2(-) and some others.
http://www.youtube.com/user/chemlabchemistry#p/u/7/5GLlU_382...

A nice synthesis is phenol from benzene. So nitrate benzene to nitrobenzene, reduce to aniline, and diazotise and form phenol, or something else if you like (iodobenzene, chlorobenzene, benzonitril, etc).

Make absolute ethanol from sugar. First you ferment sugar with yeast and a suitable environment, the you distill off the 95-96% ethanol, and you distill this with benzene (or something else like toluene) to make absolute ethanol.

Synthesis of bis(2,4,6-trichlorophenyl) oxalate (reaction of 2,4,6-trichlorophenol with oxalylchloride in presence of Et3N in dry toluene), and use this to make long lasting beautiful chemiluminescence.
http://www.youtube.com/user/NurdRage#p/u/65/ViJknvEEEOA

I'm not sure if some of the substances I mentioned can be used at school (and if they have them), such as chloroform, benzene, trichlorophenol, oxalyl chloride.

just some ideas.

zed - 9-11-2010 at 01:31

How about a project..... people can eat. Like big trays of Almond-Poppyseed muffins and Cannisters of Non-Alcoholic Cinnamon Eggnog/or Cinnamon Tea.

A big chart, describing the synthesis of cinnamon-aldehyde from benzaldehyde.....And, visa-versa. The Aldol, and the reverse Aldol?

Small, smelling samples, of the essential oils......Benzaldehyde ( Almond Extract) and Cinnamon-Sticks (Cinnamon oil).

Perhaps a glassware setup, for steam distillation.

You will never go far-wrong.....Feeding folks tasty cakes, and something to wash 'em down with.

[Edited on 9-11-2010 by zed]

Lambda-Eyde - 10-11-2010 at 16:20

Methyl orange total synthesis!

If your school has benzene, nitrobenzene, aniline (and preferably sulfanilic acid), it would be a very nice project.

Methyl orange is made by the diazotization reaction between sulfanilic acid and N,N-dimethylaniline. Sulfanilic acid should be in the school's lab (at least it is at my school) and N,N-dimethylaniline is made from aniline and methyl iodide (caution!). Alternatively, that can also be found in the school lab, but then it wouldn't be much of a total synthesis, would it?

Oh, and I must add that I'm incredibly jealous - I would absolutely love to have a whole week in the lab!

Edit AGAIN: Just realized I wrote sulfamic acid instead of sulfanilic acid through my whole post! It's corrected now.

Attachment: Methyl Orange.pdf (210kB)
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[Edited on 11-11-2010 by Lambda-Eyde]

[Edited on 11-11-2010 by Lambda-Eyde]

[Edited on 11-11-2010 by Lambda-Eyde]

spirocycle - 10-11-2010 at 16:25

http://www.homedepot.com/buy/cleaning/vacuums-floor-care/til...
sulfamic acid is only $5/pound so it should be reasonably easy to procure

not_important - 10-11-2010 at 16:47

A bit boring perhaps, but - Polylactic acid is showing up in consumer products such as plastic cups for cold mixed beverages and the foam tray under meats. It can be identified by the recycle code 7 with a PLA by it.

PLA can be converted into its easters fairly simply, by refluxing or heating with alcohols and a catalyst, or by passing an alcohol as vapour through the melted PLA (around 80 C melts most all forms of PLA and simply copolymers). The esters are generally mild smelling, some are used as 'safe' solvents. Making some of them might be a project.

mnick12 - 10-11-2010 at 19:31

Thanks for all the ideas, they are all very helpful.

Now I suppose I should give a little more info. My school is a charter school and doesn't get adequate government funding, and while we have some of the most unique and well qualified teachers we remain hindered by the lack of any "nice" facillities. In other words we don't have a what would be called a "lab" so all of this will have to be conducted at my house. Now I already have quite a bit of standard chemicals and equipment and I am certainly willing to buy the nessicary items, but I would like to avoid pawning off any of my body parts for expensive reagents etc.

So again thank you for all of your ideas, and keep em coming!

Sedit - 10-11-2010 at 20:06

Quote: Originally posted by mnick12

, but I would like to avoid pawning off any of my body parts for expensive reagents

You sure

? Well if you ever give it a second thought im pretty sure I could use a new liver right about now

DDTea - 11-11-2010 at 01:10

http://www.postech.ac.kr/class/chem441/experiment1.htm

This is an experiment I did in school and have always wanted to explore more. It's beautiful in its simplicity and the fact that the necessary tools are easily available around the house (with a bit of jerry-rigging). In my physical chem lab, we did the reaction listed in this experiment and the Zare paper (referenced in the link): hydrolyzed glycidol with perchloric acid. What I've always wanted to do is test this out on other well-characterized reactions, but alas, I do not keep a lab these days!

This would be awesome because it both shows a creative way to measure important physical properties and because it's applicable to home chemists. I think it's a far cry to expect this method to replace more common approaches to reaction monitoring like TLC, but it might find a niche with someone's work.

SelfStarter - 11-11-2010 at 22:54

You could synthesize phenethylamine via a nitroaldol reaction with benzaldehyde and nitromethane catalyzed with an base and then dehydrated with HCl to form b-nitrostyrene. Then you can reduce the nitrostyrene to phenethylamine with Zn/HCl (Or any number of reduction methods, I just thought Zn/HCl because it is cheap).

Then for your poster you can talk about PEA as a neurotransmitter etc.

spong - 12-11-2010 at 05:29

I like zeds idea of the nice smelling samples, pretty much all the chemistry I do is for compounds with pleasant smells. I definitely like your raspverry ketone or zingerone idea (top of my to do list too

) or things like nerolin from naphthanene, carvacrol from camphor, benzaldehyde as he mentioned, acetophenone is also another scent I love. Plus the classic esters too, butyrates smell so nice if you haven't made them before, the little preps of ethyl butyrate in year 12 is what got me into organic chem to begin with. Essential oils could also be good, orange is a good one plus clove, anise etc.

mnick12 - 14-11-2010 at 19:57

Well I have decided what my project will be. But first I would like to thank everyone for their ideas, and while I may not have responded to all of them I certainly considered all of them.

Lately I have been interested in catalytic hydrogenations, but the use of platinum group metals has detoured me. So after reading Klute's thread on Cu on SiO2, I decided to pursue this further. I have read 3 or 4 different patents outlining the preparation of Co and Ni on SiO2 based catalysts, and all of these patents claim atmospheric hydrogenation of alkenes can be achieved. So I have decided to "test" these articles to see weather or not these seemingly simple catalysts can be prepared in simple lab. Once the catalyst has been synthesized I will test its effectiveness by trying to hydrogenate unsaturated zingerone and raspberry ketone. This should be a fun project and will get me some major kudos from my teachers, and if it works this will be a great find for any amateur interested in hydrogenations.

DDTea - 15-11-2010 at 16:44

mnick: What if instead of raspberry ketone and zingerone, you reduced some kind of dye or other molecule with some serious conjugation in it? Carbocyanine dyes might be good for this experiment. That way, loss of color could indicate that the pi network has been changed e.g. by reduction (since that's what you're doing).

Otherwise, I would suggest approaching it in a more systematic manner. Unfortunately, with only a week, that would be hard to do!

[Edited on 11-16-10 by DDTea]

mr.crow - 15-11-2010 at 19:01

I have always wanted to synthesize Vanillin. Sounds like a good challenging organic chemistry experiment. There are several procedures from patents using guaiacol and glyoxylic acid.

spong - 16-11-2010 at 02:56

Mr. Crow, I tried making vanillin by oxidizing isoeugenol with nitrobenzene in water. The result was a brown polymerized sludge, the synthesis I read about used DMSO as well as water and I skipped this, not sure if it was vital or not. Guaiacol sounds like a much better option but where to get guaiacol?

I've resorted to buying mine from an asian grocery store to practice making zingerone on

mnick12 - 16-11-2010 at 19:26

I too have tried the synthesis of vanillin, but not from guaicol. I attempted to synthesize it by the oxidation of isoeugenol, but I don't recall which oxidizer I used I think it was dichromate. I too ended up with a gunky brownish green tar.

Anyway I just ordered 250gr of p-hydroxybenzaldehyde and a liter of benzyl alcohol (for a different project) for a very reasonable price, so that should be here in time. Thanks again everyone!