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discussion of sodiium carbonate wash

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extrememetal43

Rising Star
for those of you experienced in DMT extraction i'd like to know your thoughts on the sodium carbonate wash of some teks. My frend does use this step and found it most effective however the principles underlying the tek are bothering me. when my frend did the tek it called for adding sodium carbonate to distilled water(10% volume of solvent) til it reached a pH between 7.5 and 8.5. Then u wash with that then do 2 more more washes with distilled water(neutral ph). at the time it worked great an yield was beautiful etc i'd recomend this wash to anyone.

However, i recently read a post stating that the pH of the sodium carbonate wash should be above the pka of DMT(8.68 according to QT i believe). This made sense to me i mean u wouldnt want to put the Spice in sumthin less basic than it u could be converting it to an acid. this made me begin to think of the subsequant water washes of the solvent because those washes have a pH of 7.

I guess my question is a basic chemistry question. If you put a freebase into water of pH 7 will it convert some of the base to an acid thus making it water soluble? Or do you need some excess acid in the solution(anything less than pH 7) to convert the the base to an acid? Acid solutions have excess hydrogen floating around in them this is what makes them an acid.

I would think that if anything with a lower pH of freebase dmt(8.68) does in fact convert some of it to an acid then the subsequant water washes are doing nothin but wasting product by converting the freebase to an acid. I believe the water washes are in there for the reason to rinse any excess sodium carbonate from the 1st wash. to me this is pointless if uve ever seen the amount of sodium carbonate that goes into 1st wash its like nothing. literally like 5 grains of the stuff and the stuff is way smaller than a grain of salt. i mean i wouldnt even be concernd if u threw those few grains in one hit of the Spice i bet u it dont weigh more than a mg.

anyway what do you guys think?
 
ok if you are using sodium carbonate as your rinse to get rid of any residual lye in your non polar solvent the pH should be around 10 or a bit higher. This will make sure that all your spice is still in a freebased form. lower pH and some of the spice could become ionized and go into the water phase. remember pka is the pH when half of your compound is ionized and the other half is not (in this case its freebased). so if you set the pH to be exactly the pka of DMT then you can lose some yield (although not much if you work quickly).

the plain water rinse is not needed. the amount of sodium carbonate you use is minimal and is not a problem it wont get "stuck" in your naptha or whatever solvent you are using so dont bother it will only increase chance that you can lose some compound (although not much but still why risk it).

also always rinse your solvent not the crystals themselves its way easier and you almost can't mess up.
 
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