Daniel was in his office today doing some paperwork (the best place to think) and it occured to him that when a solvent (i.e water) and the solute (i.e. pseudoefedrine HCL) combine together they are by definition supposed to stay together. So when you bring the water to 100 degrees celcius and it starts boiling arent you also losing molecules of your sudie off in the air with the water vapor?

Actually, non-volatile things dissolved in water do not vaporize with the water.

However things like oils that have very high boiling points but are insoluble in water can be brought over with the water during a distillation. This is a very different concept though.

So you are safe boiling off a solvent and not loosing any product. You wouldn't want to overheat you stuff though.

Daniel is confused (he knows you shouldn't believe everything you hear) but what about all these steam distillation methods and stuff that say the steam will carry the psuedo over and leave the poo behind? Keep in mind Daniel means absolutely no disrespect but it just seems like all these write ups there must be sumthing of merit to this process. On the other side of the coin though if it were just that simple why wouldn't you just crush'em up and boil the mass and collect and dry the steam, or better yet just figure some way for the crystals to collect as they pass through the tube and send the water out the other side? please help to understand why this idea is like the poo that was supposed to be left behind :-D

Freebase pseudo is not soluble in water. So it falls under the steam distillation category.

keeeerblionk his lightbulb comes on. Ok so these other dreamers are first doin there little A/b shebang and then taking the freebase and steam distilling that? So if daniel the red nosed reindeer just chunks a box or ten crushed up into an appropriate sized distillation apparatus and tries to collect the steam to get his psuedo back he will merely be providing a laugh for all the other reindeers?

You need to freebase the pills first by adding base in water, then steam distilling it. This should get you pretty pure pseudo, I believe it even works for povidone infected pills. The problem is with the sheer amounts of water that must be used, and of course you will loose some of the pseudo.

Are you saying somewhere you read you should stem distill the psuedo??? Most chemical solvents (and water) have lower boiling points (when they 'steam) than an organic compound, especially drugs. To get a powder like psuedo to turn to a vapor...Ummm, not even sure if it would happen. Probably dont have equipment handy to get that hot of a tempature. Some compounds vaporize (or called being 'volitile') at Temperatures like 350 C...thats Celsius!!! Thats why you have 'poo'...the psuedo is still mixed in with the poo.

...better yet just figure some way for the crystals to collect as they pass through the tube and send the water out the other side?

Look up methods called "sublimation" and using an apparetus called a 'cold finger' (in regular human speaking terms a cold finger is something thats cold (ice) and collects passing vapors. Read the posts I posted a couple days ago about subliming iodine and it might give you an idea. Happy Learning!!

mirahkul: not all things subliminate, in fact very few solids do. Yet it is possible to make something with a high boiling point come over in a distillation wit hwater at 100 degrees C.

Say eugenol bp 240C can be distilled from mashed up cloves soaked in water. The bp of the distillation is only 100 degrees, yet the insoluble eugenol and acetyl eugenol is carried over and it floats in the water, ready to be extracted using any available non polar solvent (three extractions please).

...Yeah, I know..forgot to mention that...but he seems like the kinda person that wants to know how stuff works...Ie.

figure some way for the crystals to collect as they pass through the tube and send the water out the other side?

...well, that kinda sounds like sublimation???? and....re:

yet the insoluble eugenol and acetyl eugenol is carried over and it floats in the water.

If its insoluble and/or bp is 240 how does it do that???...I like to learn stuff too eh?

How exactly do you loose product distilling?

Burp I'm back from dinner.

Mirahkul: It forms an azeotrope with the water and distills with it. Azeotropic distillation is covered in lots of chemical engineering type texts. I don't really know how it works ;o) but I'm sure it has to do with lowered energy states caused by non-covalent interaction between molecules that sort of fit together.

Desoxyn: You profess to be a master yet you have alot to learn young Jedi.

One word, holdup.

There is a reason that one doesn't distill 10 mL of stuff in 24/40 glassware.

ok tryp thanks alot on that, so the process there is that they drop the HCL (salt part)off of the psuedo HCL by introducing it to say a 20% NaOH solution which turns it into an oil that floats on the water, and then that steam carries the oil up and out into a recieving flask and leaves behind a great deal of the "POO"? Daniel read your post on I2 mir and he thinks that is very very cool and interesting, although has only an interest in pseudo HCL for his ECA experiment would it behave in somewhat of a similiar fashion as the I2 process that was mentioned? oh and thank you and yes daniel is a teach a man to fish kinda guy he is just on intro to chem kinda simplify things a little level. well how and why things happen anyway.

The NaOH combines with the HCl to form salt (NaCl) and water, and this liberates the freebase. The freebase pseudo is a solid, not quite an oil. It will work in experiments too but to make it into a salt that can be crystallized etc you just dissolve the freebase in dry toluene and then gas it with dry HCl gas, or you can dissolve the freebase in acidic (HCl)water and then evaporate the excess HCl and water to get the psuedo HCl.

Note that acidifying until the water tests neutral is not enough to make all of the pseudo freebase turn into the salt. I don't knoe the pH at which it is all converted so you just have to over acidify it a health amount and then evap.