Seperating Xylene and Acetone? (or just removing acetone)

[n0thing]

So Acetone has a boiling temp of 56.05 °C while Xylene has a boiling temp almost three times that at 140 °C

How could one possibly separate the two? and if not:

Does this mean by leaving the Acetone/Xylene mixture on an inductive stovetop or just a boiling water bath (away from any flames) that acetone will evaporate faster (within an hour or so) and leave xylene behind? a

Alternatively if you were to leave xylene/acetone mixture out in the open, would acetone just evaporate faster naturally?

 

[endlessness]

Even more simple, wash the xylene repeatedly with water

 

[leratiomyces]

As endlessness said, washing with water will get rid of quite a bit of the acetone. You might find you need quite a few washes as acetone is soluble in both water and xylene. Large volumes of water would favour the process.

A better method would be fractional distillation, if you have the equipment. Have a thermometer in the still head and then you will know when all the acetone has come off. I am not aware of a acetone/xylene azeotrope, but I could be wrong.

If you want to get fancy and complicate things, then you could form the addition product of acetone with sodium metabisulfite and then filter/wash it out.

If you allow the mixture to simply evaporate at room temperature, you will evaporate both acetone and xylene, but obviously more acetone will come off early. But it won't separate the two as efficiently as a distillation.

 

[endlessness]

Yeah, anybody with more chem knowledge than me should correct me if Im wrong, from my understanding what happens with a wash with these 3 solvents is that when you mix acetone+xylene, they are miscible and dont form layers, but when you add water, things complicate a bit: most water separates in a distinct layer that will be composed of mostly water, some acetone and possibly tiny bits of xylene that comes due to the acetone. The xylene layer on the other hand will be mostly xylene, a bit of acetone and possibly tiny bit of water that comes due to the acetone. The more you wash, the more the acetone will move from the xylene layer to the water layer, so you are cleaning them.

In the end, after many washes, the amount of acetone in your xylene will be negligible and you can reuse it in an extraction as normal. That has been my experience with it.

If you can do fractional distillation, that'd be more precise, but I was just assuming you want a 'kitchen chem' solution

 

[atomu235]

Simply evap on a hot plate @ ~60C. Acetone will evaporate super quick. If you have a water cooled column you will be able to gather the evaporated acetone. If not use a fan to blow the fumes outside or simply do the whole thing in open air. At home solution - any hot plate with temp regulation knob + IR thermometer solves the issue of temp.

You may loose some Xylene in the process but the amount will be minuscule.

I don't think these two form an azeotrope at all. Check online tables if you want to be 100% sure.

 

[downwardsfromzero]

If you want to get fancy and complicate things, then you could form the addition product of acetone with sodium metabisulfite and then filter/wash it out.

This is also pretty effective for removing acetone or MEK from denatured ethanol. The adduct (with MEK, at least) appears to be of low solubility in the ethanol Chances are it would be equally (or more) insoluble in xylene.

Thus, washing the acetone/xylene mix with the requisite amount of sodium metabisulfite solution would do the trick; I think this is the easiest and most effective method if you don't have access to a distillation apparatus as the metabisulfite is fairly readily available OTC. A further advantage is that it doesn't involve stinky and potentially dangerous open-air evaporation.