Please, don’t do this thing.
Please, don’t do this thing.
The issue with isopropanol peroxide formation is that exposing it to air – even when just using it, like when you’re cleaning parts – starts the process. The air in the head space of your containers is also enough to form them over time. You don’t necessarily need to see solids in the containers for it to be dangerous, since they’ll crystallize out as you concentrate the solution during distillation.
It’s also a numbers game. It probably won’t explode the first time you do it. But there’s a chance each time. Do it enough, and you’ll have an incident.
There are chemical reductants that can clear peroxides. For industrial scale isopropanol distillation, I’m not sure what they use. It may be that they just never distill down to the point that peroxides concentrate to a dangerous level.
I love EnF. But I assure you, organic peroxide formers are scarier.
No no no no no.
I’m a chemist. Organic chemistry PhD, now a process chemist in the industry. I do this for a living. Do not distill isopropanol that’s been exposed to air for any meaningful length of time.
Isopropanol slowly reacts with oxygen in the air to generate peroxides that, when you concentrate them down, EXPLODE. Source. Sorry, not an open access journal. But please take my word for it.
Unless you have a way of confirming the peroxide levels in your isopropanol are near zero, do not concentrate it down by distillation. You’ll blow up your glassware, which will probably expose what you’re distilling to your heat source, which will generate a secondary fireball.
PLEASE do not do this.
I feel bad for laughing at this
I’m late to the party but I use a WhamBam build surface on my Ender 3 V2. Absolutely a game changer. Wipe it down with high-percent isopropanol or acetone between prints and it works every time. Sticks like glue when hot and just pops off with zero effort once it cools down.
Not affiliated, just love the thing. https://www.whambamsystems.com/products/235-x-235-kit-with-pre-installed-pex-build-surface
It’s a consequence of the terminally-online brain rot idea that if you do not explicitly state that you are against a bad thing, you must be actually a huge supporter of it. Or that if you do explicitly state that you are against a bad thing, the fact that you didn’t mention a different bad thing means you are a huge supporter of it. Ad nauseam.
A single AA battery is going to discharge itself just sitting on the shelf over a decade
I appreciate your thorough response, but I think it’s clear that “maximize individual freedom” is a BS marketing phrase given how much nuance you had to use when rejecting the “freedoms” I proposed.
But also. No problem with coercing workers to do 80 hour weeks? I don’t think you’ve ever been in a situation where someone had that kind of power over you.
And selling junk but “safe” medicine is as dangerous as selling cyanide labeled as aspirin. Or are you content suing the drug company after your kid’s asthma rescue inhaler was actually just full of nothing and they asphyxiate to death?
You’re forcing a black-and-white dichotomy where one does not exist, which is a nice oversimplification that’s the exact sort of thing I’m talking about.
Everyone loves freedom! Like the freedom to:
So obviously there are “freedoms” that mainly serve to infringe on the actual freedoms of others. Those just happen to be the ones that libertarians don’t talk about so much but are really what they’re after.
Libertarianism is a theory espoused to those with good intentions by people that have bad intentions.
It doesn’t work for almost anyone. But it super works for some. That’s the point.
And when you trap a xenon inside a C60 cage and start stuffing other things in there, the chemistry gets really weird.
They are called freezie pops and I will have no other slander in this thread
I sort of feel bad about raining on the parade of the person distilling isopropanol in his garage earlier, but it really is dangerous.
But most of us chemists also need to be reminded of it. To the point that someone had to write a paper whose entire point is “don’t distill isopropanol”.