Friday, July 13, 2018

Are you having more difficulty in sourcing chemicals?

"Finally, we have found the Lost City of Acrolein!"
Credit: cageclub.me
This was an interesting comment by Dan Singleton at Texas A&M about the difficulty of sourcing basic organic chemicals. (Recently, he had difficulty in ordering acrolein, which is a bit of a surprise.)

Here's a comment about the difficulty in sourcing lithium powder (isn't there a Collum prep about how to make lithium powder? Does Rieke sell that? Either way, I'd rather buy that than make it.)

I haven't noticed too much difficulty in ordering compounds these days (at least in the 100 gram range.) Now tons of compound? I think it's always hard.

What's been your experience with finding lab-scale quantities of typical organic chemicals? 

5 comments:

  1. Usually comes down to economies of scale. Some of my proudest achievements in the lab were finding economical ways to access the material I needed. Try doing research in an isolated island nation.

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  2. My company uses acrolein by the 55 gallon drum; I've never once heard of ordering delays for this process at our daily scheduling meeting.

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  3. ACS grade methanol at the beginning of the year, and ACS grade ethyl acetate recently...

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  4. Monochloramine. Tried setting up a method to analyze it, using Standard Methods. As it turns out, their method doesn't actually work. Decided to try GC for kicks, only to realize monochloramine is synthesized, not bought. ...Except that the literature on how to make it uses the not-well-validated methods to prove they made monochloramine and no di- or trichloramine, and the methods just use synthetic oxidizing agents for calibration/validation. Chicken-egg problem that I gave up trying.

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  5. I hear lately China is implementing stricter environmental regulations and the government is shutting down factories that cannot comply all of a sudden

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20