Gemmy crystals is my main motivation. I think it was
@CaptainFuture that posted transparent diamonds so long ago and seem so elusive. I really like challenges tho so this has become an addiction of sorts. Sometimes I doubt those diamonds were even DMT; but the concept of purity still attracts me. And I like to know why things are the way they are -- it wouldn't be as satisfying if diamonds just happened accidentally.
I had a really bad chem teacher in school. I'm learning so much more now, from youtube mostly. But I'm taking shortcuts while searching for such specific solutions. I'm banging out 9h of organic chem reading / videos daily and my head literally feels like it's going to pop trying to connect all the dots. I need to take a few days off to catch up on sleep, but I wanted to decompress some more conjectures from where I'm at currently.
@Transform What was the hypothesis in the ethanol/water crystallization? Are there other freebase molecules that can be freeze precipitated in water-alcohol? Could the thing in common with ethanol and xylene precipitating goo's, be water? I read those both form azeotropes with water, not sure if that is even relevant, but something in common. I've been developing a superstition toward H2O over the past couple weeks.
I'm starting to get a loose understanding of what a surfactant is; basically, any molecule with a polar head and nonpolar body. Ethanol qualifies. Even though it's miscible; in general, surfactant molecules seem to flip their orientation, relative to the solvent, depending on whether the solvent is polar or non-polar. So in a solution of mostly polar molecules, I think surfactants like ethanol find the surfaces of a solution to be a favorable place, out of consideration for their non-polar bodies that want to be furthest out of a polar solution they can be. I picture this as a film of surfactant molecules at the boundary between the water-air and water-glass. And I guess any excess are "dissolved" as micelles.
Since DMT is insoluble in water, but soluble in ethanol, when mixed together in solution I picture a pressure pushing dissolved DMT molecules toward the surfaces of the polar solution. There they can hang out, outside the shell of oriented non-polar bodies of ethanol molecules that are providing a locally non-polar micro-environment. I'm guessing this has to be a factor in crystallization. On one hand, I might assume that coagulating DMT molecules at the boundary with glass seems like a great start for building crystals. But maybe the molecular pressure effectively creates a supersaturation at the surface, inhibiting nucleation. Or maybe it's like super-nucleation; only instead of crystals growing everywhere, you get individual molecules depositing amorphously. For whatever reason, they can't solidify, then pool into an oil. Maybe since ethanol is partially polar, when there's a lot of water crowding it, DMT prefers to stay dissolved in itself - even though it's below melting point? I wonder if a seed were introduced to the oil if it would grow?
Anyway I'm more hopeful for surfactants in a non-polar solution. n-butanol is technically also a surfactant, so once hexane diffuses into it there should be a layer of n-butanol at the surfaces of the solution with their polar heads sticking out. I'm not sure what to expect from it. I'm a little worried that it might hinder the vapor diffusion process, if gaseous hexane is repelled from the polar air-surface of a butanol-hexane solution. Maybe it would also slow down the evaporation of dissolved hexane from butanol-hexane solution, leading to a lower vapor pressure than you'd expect from just averaging the two. Not sure how it might affect DMT in solution. Might make it more difficult to nucleate by repelling DMT from surfaces. But then I picture a protective blanket over the growing crystal. Maybe it would limit interactions between dissolved DMT molecules and the crystal surface -- leading to a more gentle, controlled growth. Or influence the crystal shape somehow... perhaps it would encourage needles that reach into the solution.
Circling back to water, which may be a contaminant in non-polar solvent, I'm interested in drying methods. On my way to that I was researching CO2 as an inert gas to replace wet air. I know CO2 can dissolve in water and form carbonic acid, which might be a problem for aqueous solutions. But, I read something interesting about carbonic acid. Seems it's very weak, and in the presence of water, other water molecules pull H2O off CO2 in a continuous back and forth. To me, this suggests that if a water molecule can be isolated, it will stay locked to CO2. So I wonder if percolating CO2 through a non-polar solvent would eventually dry it out completely? I picture it grabbing H2O and escorting it to the surface, although I don't really know what would happen to carbonic acid in non-polar solvent. It would be magic if H2O just evaporated away once getting ejected to the surface. Or maybe another molecule could be made available to bind with any carbonic acid that forms.
I also wonder how CO2 + surfactants might work together to manipulate water. When I search CO2 drying on google it's all about supercritical CO2. Which would be nice, but hopefully not necessary.
