Talk:Vacuum distillation/Draft

This article was created from scratch

Although Wikipedia (WP) has an article of the same name (to which I made significant contributions of expansion, re-writing and re-formatting), I wrote this Citizendium (CZ) article completely from scratch. If any of this CZ article resembles parts of the WP article, it was not done intentionally.

Image 1 in the article is a photo that I originally uploaded into Commons after obtaining the proper permission from the website where I found it. Image 2 was drawn by myself and originally uploaded into Commons. Image 3 is a photo uploaded into Commons by Andrew Yeung (WP user "Rifleman 82"). Image 4 was drawn by myself yesterday and uploaded into CZ today. - Milton Beychok

This article needs a drawing

The section of this article entitled "Perkin Triangle Apparatus" is in need of a drawing or photo, preferably a drawing simlar to the one in the WP "Distillation" article by WP user Quantockgoblin. He has declined to release his real name, so his excellent drawing cannot be uploaded into CZ. If anyone in CZ can create a similar drawing (not too similar), it would be appreciated. - Milton Beychok 19:25, 10 February 2008 (CST)

The article now has the needed drawing of a Perkin triangle set up, so I have crossed out the above comment of mine. - Milton Beychok 00:07, 16 February 2008 (CST)

I like the distinction...

...between laboratory and production-level approaches, which I'd like to see in a wide range of articles; I might even try taking that on in a few areas such as antibiotics, although you'd either laugh or cry when you saw my first college pilot plant for making laboratory quantities of a penicillin-related metabolite.

I don't have specific wording in mind, but it might be a good chemistry/engineering/chemical engineering (and maybe other engineering) to think about a consistent way to write top-level subject headings for production, pilot plant, and laboratory approaches. No, while I do know quite a bit about improvised explosive device manufacture at small scale, I don't think I want to go there, in any detail, on a Wiki.

Howard C. Berkowitz 16:19, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

The article itself is fine; it's just that the safety reminders is making my arm twitch, remembering a stage when the aforementioned pilot plant had an implosion. It was a project with a few dollars of departmental funding, so I had to use those for the fungus culture and a couple of biochemical reagents. It really should have been a pressure-driven system, with HEPA and ultraviolet for sterilizing the air, but all I could afford was some sterilized cotton in the intake and a vacuum aspirator at the far end, since that was the only pump available to me.

It wasn't really a big shard of glass in my arm, and it was penicillin coated...

Oh, if I had known about more tape...Howard C. Berkowitz 08:03, 27 December 2008 (UTC)