oopsie i made a small mistake while drawing this, it should indeed have one more carbon, but the essence of the mechanism stays the same!

Instead of a simple destillation it would be probably better to boil on reflux, so the reagents have more time to react.

I think the problems appear when the concentration of sulfuric acid increases and E2 prevails over Sn2; maybe the continuous addition of ethylene glycol will help

Same here! Seeing and recognizing some of the mechanisms helps my organic chemistry knowledge feel more practical and useful!

He does have early Nile Red vibes, like way back in the day before he started adding humour to his content, which both have their own advantages.

What did you poison yourself with? Old chemistry sets were the BEST!

Refer to J.D lee and its further readings on crown ethers and their formations

I don't have any experience in making PEG, though i am familiar with polymer chemistry. I have looked into it before, it seems like they often use polyethylene oxide which is added to ethylene glycol (or di/tri). Then depending on the desired molecular weight the catalyst is selected, where strong bases will result in low Mw polymers and more specialized organometallic catalysts can be used for more control and higher Mw synthesis. The problem i notice with products like PEG (and products that have existed for a long time) kind of lose the availability of knowing their production process simply by looking online. The production is obviously already perfected industrially but the information is just not publicly available (understandable but annoying), it's just very common with products like this! Usually i will look for papers that came out from 1900-1960 and see how it was first done, they can work but will never achieve the same quality as the perfected processes that companies have developed behind closed doors. To know how exactly these things are done today you need to know someone personally who can tell you (if not under NDA) or work in the industry urself.

@@Chemiolis yes. The ethylene oxide polymerization is very nasty I've been told. That's why any other method to make it would be interesting at least for small scales. But I guess the 6-membered dioxane is very favored compared to PEG. Perhaps this may work with longer dialcohols. Great videos!

The main side product is acetaldehyde and its acetal with ethylene glycol

It will react with water and dry the dioxane. I only did it because in the original vid he uses sodium, but i don’t think it’s really necessary. Drying it with sieves afterward is fine, and honestly putting a lot of effort to get super dry and pure dioxane is not really worth it unless u need it.

Sodium works, i just didn't have any clean sodium around

Upper. Dioxane has higher density than water so generally you’d expect it to be the bottom layer, but saturating the water layer with KOH significantly increases its density so it will be on the bottom.

@@Chemiolis nice, thanks for the response

It is not aromatic, no.

bake it in the oven at like 200C or so for an hour, generally NaOH has like 10% water if you bought it as drian cleaner and works fine for drying dioxane

@@EdwardTriesToScience thanks mate, I'll give that a try.. i think the sodium hydroxide I'm getting might be even wetter than 10%, i tried to make sodium metal and it completely failed and ate half way through the bottom of the flask so I've definitely got a water problem

@@markshort9098 Just melt it in nickel, silver or pure iron can. In the last one you may obtain slightly brown substance but I think it's not a huge problem

@@dimaminiailo3723 that was my first thought but the problem I see with melting it is it'll need to be smashed up after which would take a while and it would be absorbing water out of the atmosphere the whole time.. I need it dry for making sodium metal so I think I'll get some lithium out of a battery to dry it chemically, a little lithium contamination shouldn't cause to many problems

@@markshort9098 The cake surface is pretty small so it doesn't look to absorb as many water as it was initially. Just try it and work as fast as possible!

I wish people would stop comparing the two. Nile seems to be in it for the money. Just reposts shorts of old videos. This is better.

@@bp8652 no he isn't he he takes time to make vids on his main channel just because chemiolis upload in a somewhat consistent manner doesn't mean that nilered doesn't do anything but I respect your opinion but to kill the time he upload shorts so we have something to watch but hey I get you

@@yasserotb1454 NileRed definitely puts a lot of effort in perfecting his content. The problem with a large project can also be that if you are halfway and it has completely gone wrong and u can't get it to work it will basically be useless and u wasted a lot of time. He also comes up with many methods himself these days which aren't easily laid out in papers, so it takes a lot of extra time. In a podcast i was listening he said he would stop focusing on main channel vids for now (he said he was tired of that style of content) and will focus on new style like shorts and NileBlue. (He said in patreon exclusive ep31 safety third podcast). Anyhow, i will just do whatever i feel like doing, but i don't have Nile's lab :'). Many things i just can't do (yet).

@@Chemiolis yup

@@Chemiolis Well that sucks. The shorts aren't nearly as good. If I wanted Tiktok I'd be on tiktok lol.