That reminds me, I need to buy myself a new vacuum pump, because something got into and fouled up the oil I think, and the insides seized up, its stuck and won't start, although the motor isn't broken. Going to try and repair it first, see if I can first empty the oil out, cleanse it out with an alcohol solvent, anhydrous methanol probably, and see if I can essentially repair it by sticking in some stiff wire to dislodge the seized part and get it moving, then another change, and an anti-fouling additive if I can find one added to the next, fresh oil change. Now, curretly I am limited to a vacuum source I am very very glad indeed that I purchased, a one-piece, glass vacuum pump called a venturi, or water aspirator, that runs off the pressure generated by running water at high speed down a vertical glass column, first narrowing into a conical outlet housed in a bulb with a sidearm attached at the top on one side, this being where the vacuum pump connection is attached to, and then to the control stopcock of the vacuum adapter and then into the glass system being placed under reduced pressure at the appropriate point.
The garden hose is all thats needed to power it, the water flowing down and out, first out of the conical outlet of the water intake, and then into a narrowed portion of the vertical stem, like a wasp waist, before it widens again, the thing operates via whats called the venturi effect. Pulls less of a hard vacuum than more powerful, electric pumps but it has absolutely zero moving parts, save only the flowing water, and thus cannot seize. Cheap to replace too. I ought to buy a spare lest I ever break mine. I love that piece of glassware, I really do, its proven so useful, especially when I had the option either to use my rotary vane pump (currently inoperable one) or the venturi, when I hadn't adapters designed to limit the vacuum, so it was all or nothing. The weaker vacuum pulled by my venturi pump is even variable, by moderating or increasing the water flow.
Got to be one of my most useful piece of labware. Means I've got vacuum available as long as the outside garden hosepipe is not frozen solid. (its lagged up and padded with bubblewrap in winter, with a tub over it to prevent this) and its also much quieter since it requires no motor or other moving parts. Annoyingly wide neck of the water intale though, I'd have wished it a little smaller, so it could use regular rubber/plastic tubing, as it is, the only connection it can take is the garden hosepipe with the spraygun part taken off but that does allow for the use of high pressure flow of water.
Its one REALLY handy piece of glass, as important to my lab practice as my flasks and thermometers. But, I need either to repair it, or get, if I cannot, a better electrically powered vac pump that can pull a higher vacuum, plus of course the manometer and vacuum multi-port manifold to make use of it. (the manifold is basically a glass tube, rated for high vacuum that connects to the vac pump and the cryo-trap interposed between pump and thing pumped (to prevent contamination of the oil by forcing the exhaust to condense out any inpurities that otherwise could damage the pump, that has multiple ports which can be individually isolated from one another, so as to run multiple vac lines in parallel, separately, or have more than one interface with different parts of the same system if needs be.
My last pump, may have had some crap in the oil but nothing that would destroy it. I had it running a long, long time though, in a heatwave that almost broke records, and despite external cooling in places where no inlets or exhaust ports or fan ports exist using ice-water soaked towels it still got so hot it burnt my hand when I tried turning it off. And at that I was distilling something that even under the vacuum running as hard as it could (it'd pump a homemade, although imperfect doubtless, vacuum chamber all the way down to about -40mmHg, and the chamber is about a meter high by maybe 3.5 inches internal diameter, maybe 4'', give or take, and the end caps are rubber O-ring sealed, vacuum-greased plexiglass inserts that are nearly an inch thick. It'll pump it down to maximum pressure and it'll do so in less than a minute, pulling hard enough to cause the plexiglass to BEND inwards from the suction force.)
But even under that pressure the substance distilled, I could only get a few drops at that pressure at 130 degrees 'C. and only a few ml at 150 degrees centigrade. But if it hadn't been so hot outside, and my hotplate at the time couldn't deliver sufficient heat with sufficient focus, even lagged with foil, to distill. Kept losing vacuum pressure, if I'd been able to maintain at 140-150 'C I think I'd have been able to distill it, end game was heating from outside with a gas torch, at long distance, charring it badly and recovering only 5-6g or so of my purified ketone from ounces. Enough to show the process itself is valid and working, by testing with hydroxylamine and a mild base (carbonate) to freebase the hydroxylamine hydrochloride (freebase hydroxylamine isn't good to keep around in pure form, so rather it is typically added to a reaction mixture as a salt and then deprotonated to release the freebase NH2OH in-situ in solution, avoiding the danger of its instability at elevated temperature.
Project was FUBAR from the distillation of the ketone, honestly, but at least I got enough to test and verify that the synthetic pathway to the ketone compound I was at the time working on worked, by formation of a ketoxime using the hydroxylamine to form an oxime from the ketone (oxime formation is characteristic of carbonyl compounds (compounds with a carbon oxygen double bond: C=O ), specifically those carbonyl compounds where the carbonyl moiety is either of ketonic nature, or an aldehyde, ketones having the basic structure R(C=O)R whereas an aldehyde has a similar structure, R(C=O) but instead of the second 'R' group [R in org.chem stands for 'any moiety more or less', taken in context. Usually alkyl, alkenyl, aryl, hydrogen, pnictogen (nitrogen, phosphorus, arsenic, antimony and bismuth), chalcogen (oxygen, sulfur, selenium, tellurium and last and least commonly encountered by chemists due to its intense alpha radioactivity, polonium) or halogen (fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine,
and again a radioactive last and least, only ever synthesized in microgram quantities at most, and occuring in nature by radioactive decay as a daughter isotope in decay chains of certain radioactive isotopes of certain elements, and the total quantity of all naturally occuring isotopes [all isotopes of the following element are both radioactive and with an ultrashort half life so it can never build up naturally, indeed its NAMED for its instability] astatine, the last natural halogen, the longest lived isotope has a half life of around 8 hours, whilst the shortest lived is a few microseconds or possibly fractions of a microsecond, I forget, its incredibly short, and most of the longer lived isotopes have half lives of a minute to far, far far less than one minute, or a few seconds)
Although now, due to modern particle collider technology there exists now another halogen, this one entirely synthetic, and whilst astatine naturally occurs due to radioactive decay of naturally existing radioactive elements producing it as a daughter nuclide, in quantities of perhaps 1 teaspoonfull (an ounce or so to a couple of grams more or a couple less) distributed all the way throughout the entirety of the earth at any one given microsecond), the last currently known halogen, is the recently synthesized, entirely by the artifice of man, tennesine, a superheavy transactinide element of which only a few atoms have ever been made, and with a half life shorter than most isotopes of astatine.
Interestingly, even the shorter lived of the two tennesine isotopes, has a longer half life than the shortest lived astatine isotopes (all of either element known so far are radioactive and intensely so). The shortest lived three At isotopes are 212At, 213At and 214At, with half lives of 210 microseconds, 125 nanoseconds and 558 nanoseconds.
What is surprising and intriguing about tennesine is that tennesine is a superheavy element, and the larger a nucleus gets, the less the strong nuclear force can act upon the atomic nucleus and thus the more prone it is to flying apart spontaneously, I.e undergoing spontaneous nuclear fission, splitting into two 'daughter' nuclides, of two different elements, with the difference being lost as energy in various forms (alpha radiation, beta radiation, and gamma radiation, which are emission of an ionized helium nucleus, the least penetrating and largest, its particle radiation as is beta radiation, which takes two forms, beta minus decay, simply put, emission of highly energetic electrons, along with a counterpart, beta-plus decay, which is the emission of a positively charged electron, otherwised known as a positron, the antimatter counterpart of an electron), and lastly, gamma radiation which is not particle radiation, at least, not composed of particles having mass: gamma rays are simply extremely high energy, penetrating photons, its ultra-high energy, short-wavelength light, far shorter wavelengths in the gamma spectrum by orders of magnitude than what we can see with our eyes)
Alpha radiation is mainly dangerous if it enters the body from the INSIDE, rather than going through skin-all but the most intensely energetic alpha radiation is stopped cold by a sheet of paper, whereas beta radiation can penetrate kitchen foil (several layers would be required to stop powerful beta radiation, and beta radiation can cause burns if skin is exposed, also highly dangerous or if enough of a beta or alpha emitter is ingested somehow, lethal; but even a thin lead foil would stop it cold, whereas high-energy gamma radiation requires meters of concrete or a fair thickness (depending on the energy of the y-rays given off by a given source of gamma ray radiation) of solid lead. Its also less ionizing than alpha or beta radiation but being penetrating, is nevertheless much more dangerous than is either externally delivered alpha or beta radiation.
Quite capable of passing through one side of a human body and out the other in even the weakest case.
The tennesine isotopes known having half lives longer than astatine, despite the larger nucleus is puzzling me, having half lives of 293Ts=half life of 20 milliseconds whilst 294Ts has a half life of 50 milliseconds. That is LONGER than the shortest lived two astatine isotopes despite being bigger, heavier, and should half a shorter half life since the strong nuclear binding force, which holds atoms together, whilst intensely powerful, operates only over incredibly short distances, short enough that a large enough atom should exceed the range of the strong force, leaving only the weak force to operate on it.
Haven't yet calculated whether the neutron+proton numbers summed lead to a magic or doubly magic nucleus for either isotope ('magic' is a term in atomic physics relating to certain total combined numbers of protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus, which render certain isotopes of certain elements more stable than they would otherwise be.)
Me...and puzzles...me being me, and that 'me' being a major-league
once I start chewing on a puzzle I'm like a pit bull terrier on steroids and I really, really REALLY do NOT like to let go easily until I've chewed it to shreds, baked the pieces into a puzzle-shred pie and eaten to satiety with a nice glass of distilled satisfaction to wash my solved-puzzle-pie down. Tasty slice by tasty, addictive, moreish tasty slice and mopped up the scraps of sauce by licking my plate clean
So sue me, I'm an autie. And quite honestly, I cannot help myself from being like that when it comes to puzzling concepts and phenomena. They are the giant fucking great lightbulb to my moth
