In this video we will be making some 100% Ethanol from 95% Ethanol. I use molecular sieves but other drying agents can be used. I just like sieves the most.
This occurs when a mixture of liquids has a higher or lower boiling point, than each of the individual components. in the case of ethanol a mixture of ninety-five so the concentration of ninety-five percent there’s really nothing you can and luckily there are two other major methods that can be used to get to a another method is to add another solvent to the mixture which
Forms an azeotrope this way the other solvent and the water can be boiled off azeotropically and it it’s pretty simple and what will just be doing is adding a drying agent to the percent ethanol from any percentage lower, but for this video i’m going to ethanol so it’s a pretty simple starting point for me. i personally need it because there’s some reactions that i would
Like to run that i won’t need it for but others may is to added to gasoline. so first it’s placed into a grad cylinder and then they pour methanol in hydrometer functions based on the principle of buoyancy. density of the mixture and the more the all of this is to say that the concentration of ethanol is directly so we can see here that it’s actually floating a bit above
Ninety five percent i should also note that my hydrometer is specifically an alcohol hydrometer a regular hydrometer which shows densities and correlated to a table online. so now that we see the ethanol is above ninety five percent we see we can drive drying agent is added there really won’t be much stirring happening. from my drying agent i use what’s known as molecular
Sieves. pores are too small to allow any other larger molecules to enter. to these little beads, but the ethanol is i should note that i used 3a molecular sieves because there are afterwards by simply letting the ethanol however there are other drying agents that can be used. some people use other the molecular sieves. once the sieves are i let it sit for several hours and
Then tested the concentration and the process of picking up water can be a little bit slow though especially no also my sieves were not freshly dried, so they might not be working optimally. overkill route. so i added about a hundred and twenty grams more. downside in terms of molecular sieve loss by adding more. seeds and the more that you use the more loss will occur.
When allowed to sit overnight you can see all the dust settled to the bottom so the next step is to separate the ethanol from the sieves and to do this you’ll notice that a lot of the dust from the sieves actually makes it through. i bought mine for pretty cheap source and i think it had more dust than usual. should be left with a pretty clear solution or you can distill.
Depending on your ethanol source you might want to distill it. agents that can actually be easily removed by distillation. so if you’re only reason to distill is to get rid of the dust it might not be i then set up a fractional distillation but it is probably totally unnecessary so this is what the upper part of the distillation looked like prior to foil to insulate it
And help the ethanol pass over. eventually all the ethanol comes over at the bottom of the distillation flask were left with a mixture of the so we can see here that the hydrometer float is very nicely at the one hundred so now we have some nice one hundred percent ethanol and we transferred to an change the labels and i’m honestly not sure why i didn’t. it’s then capped,
Sealed off and labeled and were left with our nice hundred percent ethanol. you don’t shake the bottle a lot before pour it all of the dust should remain near the bottom.
Transcribed from video
How to make anhydrous ethanol (100% alcohol) By NileRed
