When you watch movies, such as Breaking bad or lessons in Chemistry, you may have seen various mysterious glassware and instruments, whose function seems totally enigmatic. During this semilab, we will learn about some of those apparatus, and you will get an opportunity to work with them. To understand how the chemical glassware works, we will use it for synthesis of some organic compounds.
In particular, we will synthesize chemicals with interesting properties (flavors, dyes, local anesthetics, drugs, etc.). We will also discuss some o f the theories behind these processes, including the theory of rectification, crystallization, as well as the mechanisms of chemical transformation that we will perform.
Finally, since basic glass blowing skills are as essential to any good chemist as soldering skills are to an electrical engineer, we'll spend some time mastering some scientific glassblowing skills.
Prerequisites: High school chemistry course