Distillation of Gasoline/Petrol 

this is one crazy bong dude

"when i got that random illegal shipment of glassware accidentally sent to me" haha what

The Graham condenser was invented by Prof. Thomas Graham, who was working for British Revenue. Liquors were taxed according to their alcohol content. Traditional methods for determining alcohol content were not accurate. So Graham made this condenser in order to precisely determine the alcohol content of a liquor.

The shadows on the corrugated iron background give this a very unsettling film noir vibe, maybe I should film these videos from the other direction, so the background is roses. There'll be more going on and possibly more distracting, but it wont give you vertigo at least

Why am I watching this... I don't know chemistry, I'm never gonna use any of this. Fuck half the time I'm not even sure what you're saying.

I'd love to see diesel fuel as comparison. I'd expect it to have proportionally more of the heavier aromatics.

Your videos are getting funnier. Loving the rambling commentary at the moment. I have a parallel adapter useful for vertical distillations so can do without the horizontal liebig. I think that grahams potentially have a decent heat transfer rate with all that surface area and a vertical orientation can mean a smaller bench footprint. I have used them for larger volume solvent recovery - set it up and crank up the heat while you do something else with the benchspace. (Washing up perhaps.) I have the exact same thermocouple too. My glass thermometers get a lot less use these days.

I thought its purpose was to evacuate the inner spiral and backfill with an inert gas, then apply high voltage. Fill the jacket with fluorescent dye for more visual effects. :P

God, finally a chemist with a sense of humor. I Lmao throughout the whole video, the way you explain things is great. I definitely sub'd

The Graham may be less useful but you have to admit it's the coolest looking condenser and the one I most want to use as a drinking straw.

I don't think petrol contains compounds with boiling points above 160°C. What I think happened during the boiling process is that you accidently created a whole bunch of polymerisation reactions (Diels Alder mechanism and other types of cycloadditions). These polymerisation products would be yellowish-brownish and would explain why the last factions were coloured. I'm not sure the dye moved at all, many dyes have quite a high boiling point so the last flask probably contained a mixture of dye and polimerisation products. Maybe you could make a follow-up about this topic? And keep up the good work, your videos are really fun to watch.

One cool misuse for a Graham condenser is when making/distilling HCl or HNO3. You can install it slanted and it keeps a bit of cooled liquid at each low spot. Not only is this fun to watch - like a "silly straw" - but it may increase contact time and recover some of the potentially wasted gasses. Using it this way also doubles as a flow indicator, as it becomes very obvious when you've hit a boiling point change (or if you need convincing to use a variable transformer, instead of a thermostat switch on your heat source). Mostly, it's just a fun little silly straw to watch while you're babysitting a long project though.

I bought a Graham condenser when I broke my Liebig. One difference I noticed right away was how much more pressure is required to push the distillate through, as compared with the Liebig. The added total surface area of all those coils heats up the coolant water much faster, even with lots of ice in the reservoir. I also noticed some oscillation of the distillate in the coils, ( I run my condenser at the same angle I used the Liebig). This caused some suck back of the distillate if I wasn't pushing the boiling flask harder than I did with the Liebig. Actually the suck back really didn't hurt anything because it was just refluxed back through the condenser all over again. This oscillation slowed the process down unless I kept the head pressure higher than I normally ran the Liebig set up at. I got the Graham to work at 45 degrees ok, I it was just sort of a pain after not experiencing any of the above mentioned phenomena with the Liebig. Millimeter to millimeter the Gramham is much more efficient at condensation than the Liebigs are but as long as what's coming over is liquid, the who really cares? I ordered another Liebig condenser because I like the ease of distillation with the Liebigs as opposed to the Graham units. That's my two cents on this. Interesting video btw!

“In Australia, we’re idiots. But we’re really smart in working out ways to cope with the fact that we’re idiots”

7:34 camera moves down the column to the roundbottom flask stirring bar: *weeee*

Your a life saver I dropped a flask on my notebook and totally ruin 2 pages all about this and you summed it up and made way less work on my part I appreciate it

coloring fuel like that is a god damn ingenious idea

4:16 Not gonna lie, had to do a double-take on that chair. Thought those were straight up tortillas.

The bongs I could make from your glass pieces is actually nutty 😂👍

While you’re right that Grahams don’t get a lot of use I love using mine for steam distillations. Something alchemical about it. Interesting video!

I wouldn't be without my Graham condenser for alcohol distillation, and being just alcohol I made the connections out of plumbing parts

These videos are fantastic, glad I subbed let alone YT finally introducing me to your uploads.

This

Funny enough I remember by mom and dog walking into the garage when I had some tube pumping the sulfuric gas outside during a distillation and she and the dog stepped on the tube which caused my still head to pop off and spray boiling acidic fumes in the whole garage. Ah memories... Always keep a gas mask on hand.

ah the memories when you just pulled up to the pump and the clerk would ask you leaded or unleaded!!

I wish I lived in Australia.. I sub to basically every channel I see (not even kidding lol) but my favorite ones are the ones "out back" haha. BigStackD is one of my favorite, among others lol. Thank you for awesome content bro!

I HAVE BEEN WAITING SO LONG TO SEE THIS ON RU-vid!!! You da chemist boi ;)

I was almost going to buy a graem condenser before I watched this Cheers for warning me mate

The Grahams are quite efficient for large scale distilation if you set them up correctly. ie you can push a lot of vapour through them before they are compromised. In essence they are just an extra long Leibig. e.g. If I'm distilling large volumes of ethanol from fermentation mixtures I tend to use a Graham.

Can you do the same for coal, and see if you get enough components to blend petrol from some of them? Or is cracking and reforming just completely beyond what is possible with a DIY set up?

"All right, the light's failing on me" Thanks, I will use that every time the sun sets now

You'll probably appreciate the Graham condenser the first time you make methyl iodide or methyl formate. The former is especially stubborn to condense.

I seem to remember a u-shaped piece of glass for hooking up a Graham condenser. It had two male joints pointing straight down. One side had a thermometer port. From there the cross piece was angled downward slightly to the other side.

I love your retort stand / lab jack.... it looks strangely like an old stool.

Teacher: "What's a cool job to have when you grow up kids?" Class: "RU-vidr!" . Actual RU-vidr: "At least I didn't die from Sulfuric Acid."

You should distill crude oil and make a video of it! Thats what I would like to see (and may try myself).

"Because it's dark" The horrors we've seen Australia house is only the first wave. The next comes out at night.

I saw the title and thought “that sounds F***ING dangerous let’s go” and clicked immediately

That is really smart because if you know you need "red" petrol its easy to find the right one

Him: Showing his glass ware *Me laughing with my 600th polypropylene bottle*

I love your corollary commentary and relevant tid bits. Gidday cobb from nz cheers mate

No Tom, you never lose. You're just taking another route to success. Ok?

There's a bunch of stuff that happens between the crude and the pump, you got isomerisation for C6 material, straight to branched conversation. Reforming from straight and cycloalkanes to aromatics.

I used to do a lot of emissions testing and we used a lot of Graham condensers but only to condense water in the gas stream and we didn't care if the condensate got stuck in the condenser because at the end of a test, we would recover the condenser as part of the sample anyway and then analyze it for what we were looking for. Used this way, it can be used sideways if you like and I believe that it is probably a more efficient condenser than the other ones and I would think that would be the case here but it would be shit for trying to use as a distillation column for example. In other words, I think it depends on the application.

"Some random liquid" got me, man. Keep it up!

You got me at "we managed to collect sweet fuck all". Subscribed. Liked. Thanks for a great video. Made me dream about setting up a chemistry lab. Made me smile.

14:06 he caused the fires in Australia

Very good vid, and yeah, roses would be a little more comfortable as background. My Graham turned out to do a very good job distilling DCM. But I hate him anyway, gave me so much headache. It was my first bad amateur mistake, choosing the more expensive Graham over a much cheaper Liebig. Always clogging up no matter how perfectly vertical I position it... It is also very inconvenient to bring it on an airplane, but being Brazil, I explained what it is for and they let me pass after stripping me down to the underpants.

AFAIK unleaded gasoline doesn't contain the organometallic complexes you mentioned. It was what was called Lead Replacement Petrol (LRP) that contained them which was meant for use with old engines that were incompatible with unleaded fuel during the transition, but it was relatively quickly phased out because consumers confused LRP and unleaded petrol. The reason was that the lead had a secondary purpose besides anti-knocking, it protected the valve seats against erosion by depositing a thin lead layer on top of them, and the organo-metallics were meant as a replacement for that (more modern engines designed for unleaded petrol use erosion-resistant materials in their valve seats). Unleaded fuel uses aromatics, ethers and alcohols (mostly ethanol) as anti-knocking agents.

Ah yes ... " Sweet fuckall" one of the lightest distilents of Australian petroleum

Butane is interesting in that it dissolves in water, unlike Propane which is only minutely soluble. Beware Gas Engineers using Water Gauges, your gauge will always indicate a leak on a Butane system, and eventually, the gas plumbing will go into a vacuum as the Butane dissolves into the water inside the gauge. Even the gas safety standards centre did not know about this one.

came for the lizard stayed for the backyard science experiments

Talking about tetraethyl lead for some reason reminded me of this time when I was in grade 2 or 3, the principal said some older kids were seen breathing exhaust from the exhaust pipes of cars. I don't even know what would possess somebody to do such a thing.

I started my new year watching this video

GREAT and UNIQUE video. Everyone including me wanted someone to distill some gasoline. Sweet. I cannot believe you hate the graham condenser and a lot of other people do too. TRUST ME I KNOW ALL THE NEGATIVE THINGS ABOUT IT BUT I always say it is great BUT ONLY FOR low boiling liquids. Like liquids boiling close to room temp. I feel if it is refluxing that the liquids trapped in the coils help prevent gases from exiting the condenser. And when distilling room temp boiling point liquids i feel the puddles stuck in the coils help to build up the gases and give them more time to condense to a lot lower temperature than it's boiling point. And give the gas a chance to dissolve in its own condensation. So no gas escapes out by the receiving flask. But for anything else i think it really sucks.........BUT THEY LOOK COOL. I loved having it when i distilled methylbromide. I think a liebig or ahlin would have not been as good. I think a lot more methylbromide would have evaporated in the receiving flask.....and yes i had an ice bath on the receiving flask.....................But this is just an opinion. I have never really read any books that were specifically about condensers.

I'm old so I remember leaded petrol. I was told lead was added to petrol to improve the lifespan of the valve seat components of the engine.

Welcome to this weeks edition of "Why is this in my recommended?"

They have a recovery between point a° and point b° and include trace other elements. It is washing that produces the pure element individually.

“And then 70% of the alkanes are gay”😂😂

the 70 degree adapter is a distillation head adapter, its used on the other side of the liebig just without a thermometer

Чувак, ты просто в раю живёшь!!! Тут приходится иной раз выворачиваться на изнанку ради таких простых и весёлых вещей...

How about distilling motor oil?

Well, the graham condenser is pretty important.. :D at least in german universities it is used everytime. But it does not make sense to use it in a fractional destillation, as you said. You can use it for reflux in any kind, e.g. recrystallization, activating grignard reagents, just to keep your solvent when heating a flask and stuff. You can also use it for a two and three necked flask.. No problems at all and a very very important glassware

I like to think you're one of the scientists in the beginning of resident evil. Very cool

Regarding Tetraethyl Lead in Gasoline - I grew up in what most of the world thinks of when they think of America's "Midwest" - a little

nixrate, your comment on lab tidiness strikes a chord with me. The undergrad teaching chem labs at the university where I graduated were meticulously clean and orderly- like the absolutely spotless pharmaceutical clean rooms where you'll be hard pressed to find a speck of dust. Whereas, the postgrad labs were more like some of the rooms and communal kitchens at the campus Halls of Residences!

Too long separating column can have negative effects. It tends to cool easily and you need lot of thermal insulation. It can also lead to cranking up the heat to get anything through and you can get into pushing stuff through with vapors with very bad separation. In small scale you can also get problems with having enough materials to fill a huge column with vapours at all. For extreme separation you are much better off with single lengh column and you can use columns that take filling materials (usually glass/plastic) to get more surface area for better separation.

Graham condesor is primarily used for low boiling components with ice water or ethylene glycol/water/dry ice or isopropyl alcohol/dry ice or some other cooling agent.

"Hi, today we're going to boil some gasoline in my backyard"

The accute angle on the graham condensor elbow is meant to be the highest point in the evap system. In america we use graham condensors all the time in appalachian style liquor stills. Its what my pops uses to make out whiskey out of his copper still!

The Graham condenser is my idea of a more effective condensing distillatory as it has a larger surface area. I always worry that my condensers aren't long enough and much of my distillate is being lost into the air.

I recently read a bit about the burning properties of organic compounds. :D Hydrocarbons tend to produce more soot when burned the longer they are. So, it might not all be due to double bonds. It would be interesting to do some more tests on the fractions, like treating it with baeyers reagent or bromine water.

I love how I get an ad for petroleum dyes on this vid

Fun fact; it was a guy called Thomas Midgley that worked out using lead in fuel to reduce knocking, and he was responsible for one other major adaptation... he pioneered the use of CFCs in refrigeration. What an unfortunate combination.

This seems like it could have very easily became an episode of Explosions & Fire

4:07 have you thought about heating it up and modifying the glass? Make it something more useful...

The graham has more cooling surface than the liebig and can put away a lot of heat at the right water flow rate. Its most used in reaction interstages or if you need a low end temperature.

MMT additives, if I remember correctly, leave a reddish deposit on spark plugs. Might be a good identifier...

This is the best account on RU-vid dude.

Maybe the yellow tinge of the highest BP fraction could be explained by pi conjugation (alternating single and double C bonds)? Maybe traces of a biphenyl (fused aryl) species?

Can you please show us how to refine crude oil or used oil into diesel and petrol so I can build a mini refinery

30% straight and the rest ... rofl, damn, that delivery!

I knew there was something fishy about those alkanes.....

I would have liked an added bonus of a sniff test. Toluene/xylene has a distinctive smell. And as far as the others, im curious if there was any difference. But yea. Always wanted to try something like that. I have some 112 octane racing fuel i want to give a go. Great idea for a video.

I think the angle on the corner piece puts the condenser at an angle that encourages liquids to not get caught up in it.

Nice job on the "Dinoaur squeezins".

Ecellent video. Thank you!

It's far too late now, but I wonder how the odor differed across fractions.

I actually think that you did indeed distill either the dye itself, or some decomposition products, over. None of the short-chain alkyl-benzenes would have that colour, or decompose to that colour in your setup. You didn't filter the gas stream through a fine sinter, nor did you do a lagged distillation. Combined with the VIGOROUS boiling speed and switching to only using one Vigreaux column, I would expect more than enough of the dye to make it over (irrespective of what it's vapour pressure is at your maximum temperature. It could be 0, but would still come over with the mass flow.), especially since so little is required for the colour to be noticeable.

"Well I thought that will be easy, so naturally I failed it." Story of my life.

You, uh. You did pump the coolant from the bottom up. Right?

Very Nice video. I've always been interested in distilling gasoline, but I haven't seen any videos on it. You mentioned how they dye the different grades in Australia. Im not sure if you know, but in the US certain fuels are dyed too.. but not anything you'd get at a regular station. They dye off road diesel fuel and fuel oil red here, because you don't pay the road tax on it. You're obviously not allowed to use it in a road vehicle... They also dye aviation fuels different colors so they don't accidentally put the wrong fuel in an airplane

Do they make an inverted Graham condenser? You pointed out that the distillate could clog the coil if it weren't vertical. What if the coil carried the coolant, and the outer part held the gas? Then it could be used at most angles. Just a thought. The condensation would collect on the coil, drip off into the lower neck, and if the encasing tube were tapered, not made with a shoulder, it would be easier to collect at most angles. Also, if you're thinking, "Well, it would bead up at the bottom of each ring of the coil," but you could also mount a long, straight glass rod to the bottom of the coil. It would collect all the drops and drips in a straight line, and gravity would bring them all down together to the exit. It's not an impossible design, and it could work. Just don't touch the outer glass. You can with a normal Graham, but this would have the hot gas in contact with the outside this way.

Legend say if you leave your chemistry equipment outside aliens come down and do an experiment for you

Lololol I love my Graham condenser. Step 1 make blackberry wine, step 2 distill it, step 3 drink the majority of the distillate, step 4 go to work

Could you do this with an oil and get some volatiles from it? Make your own petrol from oil?

can i buy some of the glassware off u . and i really need the rubber seals that sit on a vaccuum flask for a buchner funnel if you have any spares

How do you seal your thermocouple probe so vapours don't escape out the top. Would your method work for sulphuric acid distillation? So happy I found your channels. Thanks for the hard work you put in. You remind me of Matt from Stand Up Maths.

I was wondering where the ethanol was. Here in the states, there's ethanol in everything. You can visibly tell the change over the years. All you have to look for is the prevalence of Baudonia fungus growing on exposed surfaces around filling stations, gas cans, and filler doors on vehicles. That shit is everywhere now.

what colour is 2-stroke oil in Australia? most of it here in the the uk is red so that might get a bit confusing with 91 fuel!