Crown ethers are not practical IMHO. Also, not so sure a crown ether holding a sodium ion would reduce easily, it is after all a caged inside the
crown ether quite well.
As for the salts of fatty acids, you mean soap? Soaps in organic solvents form reverse micelles, not solutions of discrete sodium palmitate (or
whatever fatty acid). Reverse micelles have tails pointing outwards and the ionic bits in the centre, usually with some small amount of water in the
centre as well. Not so sure that they would work as an electrolyte because the micelle is neutral as a whole, the core forms an electric double layer.
Perhaps when sodium methoxide dissolves in pentane, a similar thing happens in which case blogfast would be correct and it wouldn't
be an electrolyte.
Maybe one simply cannot form an electrolyte in non-polar solvents because ionic materials, even if you get them to dissolve, would always prefer to
order into some kind of charge neutral complex within it, i.e. perhaps the only way to make it energetically favourable for this not to happen is to
intercede with a solvent that has a high dielectric constant and so by definition cannot be a non-polar one.
The most polar solvents I know of that might not react with sodium are the carbonates, e.g. ethylene carbonate and propylene carbonate. There was talk
of this a while ago to use for electrolyzing alkali salts, but I think it was never carried out.
These carbonates proved difficult to order IIRC and somewhat of a pain to synthesis from urea and glycols.
Anyway, I think we should simply chalk up my original idea as a crap one
[Edited on 17-10-2015 by deltaH] |