DIY Sublimatory?

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I like the idea of sublimation for purification. It seems like the cold finger would have to be cleaned repeatedly to purify a moderate amount, though.

Could you make your own sublimation apparatus out of a stainless steel vacuum chamber kit like these:

I was thinking of drilling a large hole in the glass lid, and plugging it with a stainless steel bowl + gasket. Inside the bowl could be dry ice.

Alternatively, could replace the whole lid with a sheet of metal and cool the entire lid.

DMT in the bottom, pull vacuum, close valve, apply heat = sublimation? (Looking for the sublimation point if anyone knows).


I think it would work, but I'm wondering it there's a reason that lab-glass sublimatories are so small? Is it important to have a small distance between the solid and the coldfinger? Would a 3-5 gal pot be too large of a chamber?

 

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In theory could this work in reverse? Instead of having the cold finger above the solids, could the entire vacuum chamber be submerged in an ice bath, with the dmt suspended from the glass lid? I'm thinking infrared light could be used from above the glass chamber lid to catalyze the sublimation. Then vapor drops and deposits on the walls and bottom of the chilled chamber.

 

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Sublimation is optimised by minimising the distance between the impure starting material and the resublimation ("condensation") surface, otherwise too much product disappears out of the vacuum exhaust. Sublimator apparatus typically consists of a side-arm tube, with a fairly snugly-fitting cold finger. The vacuum chamber would be far too big to use in its entirety, but sublimation experiments have always appealed to me.

One further stumbling block is that DMT's melting point - or at least, some of its melting points - is/are rather on the low side for sublimation to be fully effective. Nothing wrong with a vacuum distillation, of course, although you may have to go with a Kugelrohr to avoid clogging up a condenser with solidified distillate.

 

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Thanks for your help! I've since found more threads concluding it's practically impossible to sublimate dmt without a very deep vacuum, and even then I haven't seen any proof. My idea was to draw the vac and close the valve before applying heat. The chamber is capable of holding the vacuum without the pump running, but this pump+chamber setup wouldn't be strong enough anyway. I'm guessing the strongest vacuums have to run continuously to maintain deep vac, so I guess volume/distance would be an issue then.