There was one time when I put a mold filled with liquid water in a cold container and made solid water.
Yeah, polar/non-polar extractions are about as far as my home chemistry got. But the LSA was good.
Liquid gas column extraction of organic compounds? I'm told that's something you should definitely do outside!
Alcohol isn't that great as an organic solvent. Are you using the air fryer to evaporate? That must be a fair fire risk!
Butane on the other hand is a good organic solvent and will evaporate at room temperature (just don't evaporate it in a room or near any heat source).
I'm happy with it - i feel like the extraction i get is pretty good for the ease and safety of my little setup. I'm not trying to make enough to sell, just mostly making cheezits and candies for friends. When i do have a lot to process i usually do a dry ice shake.
Probably something using dihydrogen monoxide as a solvent for a mixture of organic compounds
Closest I've come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.
It was a lot of fun and instead of one 5gal batch of beer from an exotic $20 yeast sample you could get as many as you wanted. In practice I usually did 5-10 cultures from each pure sample. Could do more than that but there was a limit to how much stuff I could sterilize in my "autoclave" at one time.
Edited to add: I successfully cultured yeast from hefeweizen, but since what's in the bottle is typically for secondary/priming rather than primary it was only for fun. I had 100% failure trying to harvest wild yeast from the air or sampled from fruit skins. I couldn't isolate the yeast from other critters.
A lot of those same steps/skills are used in growing magic mushrooms, if you're ever looking for a new hobby
For me it has been etching circuit boards and specifically making my own liquid tinning solution at one point. I mostly do hydrochloric acid/hydrogen peroxide on larger stuff and ferric chloride on smaller prototypes.
I'm surprised that nobody has done an extraction of organic/aromatic content in an oil/fat ? Have you never backed some "space cakes" ? I haven't but I've seen people doing it, and it's pretty advanced chemistry when you think well
Steel etching with Winsteard's reagent. It is a bit dangerous because if done wrong it forms explosive dust. It was also long and tedious because the liquid must be near boiling and stirring so it evaporated quickly and has to be topped off and brought back to temperature often. The etch itself requires a long temper of a quenched sample and has an iterative process of etching and back-polishing to gradually remove surface roughness but leave the slightly deeper grain boundaries.
It took several hours of preparation and several hours of active work per sample and even then had a 50/50 success rate. I was professionally trained by a third party who learned this process from the person who perfected it, George Vander Voort.
I don't know if we can call it chemistry but quenching steel.
In high school I was doing blacksmithing and so quenching the blade was part of the process, probably my favorite part.
Heating the blade above 800°C and dipping it in oil, with the oil instantly catching fire was always very dramatic.
I used to be an industrial chemist. We did esterification reactions to turn chicken fat and laxatives into oil field soaps by the truckload. So I guess mid-level organic chemistry?
Mixtral 8×7B says you were making "sodium alkyl sulfates" for cleaning the unique long chain carbon chemical properties unique to oil drilling rigs and that chicken fat and laxatives were potential sources for the long chain alcohols needed for producing such soaps.
She is pretty good at sexting, but how good is she at cleaning an industrial oil rig as a mid-level chemist? /s
There was also something about a long chain alcohols reacted with a concentrated acid to make carboxylic acids plus heat pressure and water to make soap.
That level of detail is usually not quite right with this kind of LLM, but I'm curious overall how close it got? Duck Duck Go tried to convince me to shop for oilfield bath soap soap on Etsy instead of telling me what an oil field soap is and nothing came up on Wikipedia.
Soaps are generally speaking, salts of fatty acids not long chain alcohols and strong acids. Dont trust LLMs for anything important.
They are certainly not primary sources. I did a quick search and the internet is far less trustworthy now. LLMs are like water cooler conversations. According to the internet, you basically did Etsy stuff. I think the LLM got a little closer.
Made pH 14 lye to break down some plant cells and extract stuff. Then putting "surgical spirit" (I hate common english terms) in it to extract it, pipetted it carefully and let it evaporate.
Best DMT you can get :D
No, "Wundbenzin" which is clean "Benzin" which is "Petrol Ether".
Its really confusing, in german we say "Benzin" to a mix of alkanes that are between Kerosine (really light) and "Petroleum" (pretty heavy, used in lamps) afaik.
In the US "Benzin" would be "gasoline" or "petrol" which is already so weird. And as that name for alkanes of medium long length is not reused, stuff like "spirit" or "ether" come along which are as far as I know both wrong (not an alcohol or an ether)
Gold and Tellurium nanoparticle synthesis was the most interesting but I am not sure it qualifies as "complicated" given the procedures we used.
If computational chemistry qualifies, I have run on the order of 5,000 DFT optimizations+freq and of those, the most complicated ones involved metallocarborane clusters. These are composed of Boron, Carbon, a metal and different groups coming off the cluster. The largest one that I worked on took about a week to run the calculations on my home machine.