Cleaning Aluminium salts

[bodhidharma]

Dear community,

swim has bought a pot promised to be stainless steel online so he didnt check it with a magnet and used it to simmer the HCl saltings from xylene from san pedro.

luckily he noticed that it pot walls is starting to change to a dark color so he took it out quite fast but the pot is quite black on the inside and the liquid which is the MAIN CONCERN got blueish greenish from a nicely well done milky white HCl mesc water (

the question is how to remove this aluminium hydrochloride COMPLETELY to not anger the cactus gods^^

thanks all

 

[modern]

Check the solubility. A quick search shows aluminum chloride is soluble in alcohol so a simple 99% isopropanol wash should remove the aluminum chloride leaving only the mescaline hcl. I would repeat it a few times even at a small loss of mescaline just to make sure.

 

[Transform]

Greenish blue coloration suggests the iron, nickel and chromium may have leached out of low-grade stainless steel. Aluminium would not give rise to this colour, and not all stainless steel is magnetic. Would it be fair to infer that your online purchase was done to keep costs to a minimum? It could be that quality corresponds to price here, but I also wouldn't expect even a decent-quality stainless steel saucepan to emerge unscathed from contact with boiling HCl.

Fortunately, perhaps, you can add base and the metals should precipitate out as hydroxides. It should be possible to repeat the xylene pulls, although I'd be concerned that the small amount of finely powdered precipitate may interfere with this, making it hard to eliminate all of the contamination.

Aluminium chloride reacts with water to form mixed hydrates and hydroxychlorides, so while I suspect aluminium isn't the issue, in these circumstances (aqueous conditions) an alcohol wash likely wouldn't do much. Mesc HCl would also have some solubility in wet IPA, so there are a good few caveats to this plan.

Ideally, you'd aim for adding an acid or anion that forms completely insoluble salts with iron, chromium and nickel. It may be worth adding a small or even tiny amount of sodium bicarbonate and simmering gently to precipitate the metal carbonates while keeping the mescaline in solution. Less bicarb is better than more since you want to avoid adding an excess. If the colour persists, repeat the process.