Organic Chemistry Shenanigans

Fractional Distillation Apparatus 

I feel like organic chemistry has taken over my life now that I have two 4 hour labs and 3 hours of lecture each week on top of the countless hours I spend studying for this class. But for some odd reason I can't help but love O-chem. Aside from the brutal work load I get to do some pretty fun things in lab. The other day I made ethanol from sucrose (in other words I was making some booze). The fermentation process took about two weeks and after that came the distillation. The picture to the left is the macroscale fractional distillation apparatus I set up to distill my product. I'll avoid rambling about the interesting chemistry behind this, but it's experiments like this that remind me why I like this class. I wonder how many people can say they've made alcohol at school... Of course none of us drank our final products, which is probably a good thing after finding out what a horrible moonshiner I would've made. My final product was only about 70% pure ethanol, which is nothing to brag about when some of my classmates had products that were over 90% pure. In my case, it's unfortunate that the labs are graded on purity but I promise not all of my experiments turn out this bad.

Here are some of the other toys (equipment) I have in my laboratory locker.