Guys, am I a dumbass or what?
I'm a chemistry major and I think chemistry is pretty fun. I even do home organic chemistry as a hobby. I'm decent at learning stuff; I made A+'s in general chemistry, organic chemistry, and biochemistry I. But I don't think I can discover anything new.
I'm a junior and the only research topic I could come up with for my undergrad research class is seeing if deep eutectic solvents can extract long-chain alcohols from esters. E.g. extracting 1-octanol from a mixture of octyl acetate and 1-octanol. This mixture is formed from fischer esterification, because fischer esterification never goes to completion so there's always going to be some unreacted 1-octanol remaining. I came up with this research topic because I synthesize esters at home as a hobby, i find their smells entertaining. but I realized it's difficult to purify an ester that contains long chain alcohols because water extractions can't remove fatty alcohols, column chromatography of colorless compounds requires a GC to analyze several portions of eluent, and their boiling points are too close together to separate by fractional distillation, let alone dealing with azeotropes.
it's based on another research article on separation of alcohols from esters, but it focuses on aromatic esters and not long-chain aliphatic esters, so I wanted to see if it works for long-chain aliphatic esters too. My hypothesis is that it does, because I've tried this at home with impure octyl acetate that had a low boiling point and 1-octanol smell, and after washing with DES, it boiled at literature BP and no longer had 1-octanol smell. But now I can try this at university so I can use GC-MS to confirm that it actually works.
it's not a very novel research topic. not publishable in ACS. i'm disappointed that this is the best thing I could come up with. i'm probably a fool in the research group, meanwhile the grad students are doing all this crazy organic semiconductor stuff that I can't understand.
I'm a chemistry major and I think chemistry is pretty fun. I even do home organic chemistry as a hobby. I'm decent at learning stuff; I made A+'s in general chemistry, organic chemistry, and biochemistry I. But I don't think I can discover anything new.
I'm a junior and the only research topic I could come up with for my undergrad research class is seeing if deep eutectic solvents can extract long-chain alcohols from esters. E.g. extracting 1-octanol from a mixture of octyl acetate and 1-octanol. This mixture is formed from fischer esterification, because fischer esterification never goes to completion so there's always going to be some unreacted 1-octanol remaining. I came up with this research topic because I synthesize esters at home as a hobby, i find their smells entertaining. but I realized it's difficult to purify an ester that contains long chain alcohols because water extractions can't remove fatty alcohols, column chromatography of colorless compounds requires a GC to analyze several portions of eluent, and their boiling points are too close together to separate by fractional distillation, let alone dealing with azeotropes.
it's based on another research article on separation of alcohols from esters, but it focuses on aromatic esters and not long-chain aliphatic esters, so I wanted to see if it works for long-chain aliphatic esters too. My hypothesis is that it does, because I've tried this at home with impure octyl acetate that had a low boiling point and 1-octanol smell, and after washing with DES, it boiled at literature BP and no longer had 1-octanol smell. But now I can try this at university so I can use GC-MS to confirm that it actually works.
it's not a very novel research topic. not publishable in ACS. i'm disappointed that this is the best thing I could come up with. i'm probably a fool in the research group, meanwhile the grad students are doing all this crazy organic semiconductor stuff that I can't understand.
