Transcription
Can we make nitroethane with electrolysis? Can Chat GPT do chemistry? Let's find out.
So first of all, I'd like to thank everybody. I really wanted to upload a video in time to thank everybody for 666 subscribers. However, um, we already are at a thousand, so I would like to thank everyone for that. Thank you so much for the support. Uh, those of you who are not, feel free to like and subscribe. Check out the Patreon if you'd like; the link is in the description. What I've done is I have gone and taken our red play button, and now we have a blue play button. And I would like everyone to know that I've shown that this is the color blue without burning down the state of California.
So this actually was adjusted by a viewer, and I completely loved the idea, so I went with it. So I decided to put a little spin on the idea and include Chat GPT into this because I've been using it for quite a while. Obviously, it's extremely popular; it is the most popular growing app ever—a hundred million users in however many months, like three months or something. Even TikTok didn't do that. So I figured we'd kind of dive into that a little bit. I have used it for math, which is not great. You know, some people like to write poems; it's great at that. I've used it for more advanced theory, uh, chemistry-related questions. However, I've never used it to tell me to do a procedure. So I have, you know, prompt-engineered up a little prompt for this experiment, and I'm going to follow it decently closely, and we're going to see what we get. So hopefully it doesn't blow up my house, and we can at least yield some sort of product, and you know, we'll just have to see what happens. So let's get into it.
All right, so for this reaction, we're going to need some sodium propionate, or however you say it, potassium nitrate, 500 mL of water, some pH paper, some electrodes, a hot plate stirrer, and a bench power supply. All of this can be obtained from your Supreme Overlord, Amazon. Fill up the beaker with about 500 mL of water and place a stir bar inside. I'm going to not so carefully weigh out 16 grams of sodium propionate and spill it all over the place; it's tradition. Next, I'm going to weigh out 13 grams of potassium nitrate and add that all in the mix. After searching for a while to find something to hold the electrodes that'll do, I'm using platinum for my anode and carbon for the cathode. Gently cut a slit in the lid to hold the anode. Now I'm going to drill a hole in the lid to hold my carbon, being careful as to not cut it too large, as I'm terrible at using a drill. I naturally cut the hole too large. I'll be using the answer to all life's problems to fix this: hot glue. If you can't fix it with hot glue, you're doing it wrong. To get a little better contact and connection on my carbon, I stripped a length of copper wire to wrap around the electrode so I get something to attach the little alligator clip to. Next, I'm going to prepare an ice bath; the reaction should be kept below 10 degrees. I'm going to quickly check the pH before I get everything set up. For the duration of the reaction, we're going to want our pH to be about seven. I found that it does fluctuate, so it helps to check it often. To be extra fancy, I'm going to add a blanket of argon to my beaker; don't know if it's necessary, but let's do it. Right now, I'm going to start at 3 amps, and we'll go from there. I decided to check the pH every 30 minutes for the first few hours, adding acids or bases accordingly to keep it at seven. I eventually switched to checking every one hour and ran the reaction for about 20 hours.
Okay, let's try and explain what the heck's going on here. During the electrolysis process, water is oxidized at the anode to produce oxygen gas, hydrogen ions, and electrons. The oxygen is evolved as a gas, while the hydrogen ions and electrons participate in a reduction reaction at the cathode. At the cathode, sodium propionate and potassium nitrate are reduced in the presence of hydrogen ions and electrons generated at the anode. The reduction of propionate leads to the formation of nitroethane, while the reduction of potassium nitrate produces nitrite ions and potassium ions. Carbon dioxide, nitrite ions, potassium ions, and water are all byproducts of this reaction. The pH is kept around 7 as it affects the reduction reaction at the cathode. I also decided to put this back on the hot plate so I could stir it the full time. After 20 hours or so, I break everything down to get ready for workup. I'm going to use ethyl acetate to extract the nitroethane, and with heavy stirring, I add about 100 milliliters. I should have used a larger beaker for this, but I made questionable decisions all the time. I add the mix to a separatory funnel and let the layer settle. This is a 250 ml funnel, and I broke my 500 because I'm extremely clumsy. After running a second batch through the funnel, I transfer everything to a small beaker to dry it out. I decide to add a random amount of magnesium sulfate from a previous video to try and accomplish this. After some stirring, I get everything filtered and ready for distillation. The ethyl acetate will come over in the 70s, and the nitroethane should come over in the 120s. [Music] Thank you. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Thank you.
All right, here we are and ready for results. So we were successful in making nitroethane with this procedure, with electrolysis, and with Chat GPT's instructions. We made a little less than 10 milliliters, though. So given the fact that it's a 24-hour procedure, is it efficient? Is it worth it? No, absolutely not. However, that was actually my first home electrolysis procedure; it was a blast. It's very interesting to explore the chemistry. I would really like to thank you for the suggestion; it was a great one. He also had another suggestion which I would like to do as well. Very obtainable procedure, sounds really interesting, and there's a lot of interesting ideas coming up. And one thing that's kind of in common with all of them is they're not currently on YouTube, so it's it's a breath of fresh air; it's it's something different; it's not just another bromine video or another whatever video. Uh, you know, that one guy beat me to carbon tetrachloride by two weeks; that was that was fun. Um, but you know, the the ideas coming up in the future are all interesting.
So was Chat GPT actually able to do chemistry? Uh, I would say yes. However, I did make tweaks to its procedure; the amounts that it told me to use, I would have gotten less than a milliliter of nitroethane in theory. Um, but in the real world with distillation, I wouldn't have gotten anything. Uh, you know, that's that's just nearly impossible to isolate that with distillation. So I did have to make adjustments. Um, my my main takeaway with all of Chat GPT is to, uh, you know, work on prompt engineering and giving it the right information. It's going to give you exactly what you put in, not maybe necessarily what you want, so tweak it around a little bit. And then also it always requires a double check. Uh, for some of the written chemistry questions I've tried, like calculating gas pressures or whatever, it does a very good job at telling you what to do. Uh, however, it can be confidently wrong in its math and other things like that, so everything needs to be double-checked before going forward with it. However, I think it did a really good job here, and I it was it was really fun. So that's going to do it for this one, guys. I'm currently fighting cubane, trying to bring you guys another video, hoping to bring you one soon; still working away on that, I promise. If you enjoyed the video, feel free to like and subscribe, leave a comment down below, uh, check out the new Patreon in the description below, and we'll see you guys later.