Maroboduus - 21-10-2016 at 18:08
I've been prowling estate sales and garage sales for old cans of interesting solvents (a lot of these things have been re-formulated, but it's amazing
what turns up in some old products, benzene, CCl4, etc), and I picked up a gallon can containing a mixture that's mostly methylene chloride, xylene,
and chlorotoluene.
These I can just distill, but it's the remainder of the ingredients that I'm not sure how to handle. As the subject header says, it's mixed xylenols
and ethyl phenols. These have high boiling points which overlap(200-230), but what about extracting them as potassium or sodium phenolates and trying
to either selectively crystalize them as salts, or liberate the acids and freeze them out of solution?
These phenols aren't things I really need, but they sound like they could come in handy some day, so I'd like to get them out and separate them if I
can. Anybody had any experience with this kinda material?
I haven't even been able to chase down an msds for this stuff, because the same product name is now used for another, newer mixture, so I'm not really
sure of the percent of each component.