It took a number of tests before I finally made what I believe is butadiene from ethanol in a pure enough state over the course of the break. The trick was to include powdered purified lightstone with the powdered magnesium oxide and enough water to wet them, heat it to a decently high temperature, then break the clumps back down to a powder. We weren't getting much as an output before that, so adding silicon dioxide made a big difference. I recalled at some point during out testing that often times a matrix of silicon dioxide is used as part of various catalysts to change the surface properties of catalytic particles, as well as allowing for a combination of acid and base interaction sites.

In any regard, butadiene is a somewhat odd material. First and foremost, the process had to occur at a fairly high temperature, though I'm not that surprised, as the chemical energy must come from somewhere to drive the reaction, and if it's a singular, stable input material, heat or pressure are the only obvious methods to drive equilibrium one way. The byproducts of the reaction are water and hydrogen gas, in addition to any water present in the initial ethanol mixture and any unreacted ethanol. That makes recovery fairly simple, as they each have fairly distant liquid and gas ranges, which was how I was fairly certain we'd made butadiene.

It's highly flammable with oxygen, which presents a bit of a storage risk, though not nearly as bad as our nitroglycerin. A potential issue, however, is going to be separations from other organics, as I've already seen that you end up with quite a bit dissolved in leftover ethanol. That will likely make recovery from cracking nearly impossible without a proper selective solvent. I know from earth that modern butadiene was almost all produced as a product from oil, so there should be some selective solvents to get it. The reason it would be difficult is that cracking isn't a very selective process, and produces many products as longer carbon chains are 'cracked' into smaller ones. I'd expect other four carbon compounds like butane to have similar enough properties that they'll all form solutions with each other in gas and liquid states.

So, while I know that it is possible, and would be useful, the hunt for such a solvent could take some time, which means I'd rather try to find some enterprising student or students to research it. In it's place, we'll aim to produce more ethanol from crops as our source of butadiene. There are some other steps I'm still in need of completing as well. We haven't made ethylbenzene or styrene yet, which ethylbenzene requires a Frield-Crafts catalyst to proceed, which is usually a strong lewis acid and a solid.

While both butadiene and styrene can self-polymerize at higher temperatures, work has to be done to control those reactions. At lower temperatures, both self-polymerize so slowly that we only need to be concerned if they sit for a few days. Since plan to use them relatively quickly, this shouldn't be a problem. For styrene, if we want to make polystyrene, we can actually just allow it to self-polymerize while cooling it to prevent explosion as the polymerization is exothermic. For butadiene though, there are multiple ways it can polymerize that heavily affect it's properties requiring careful catalyst selection to produce meaningful polymers. Styrene's polymerization can also affect it's properties, but the most desirable form is actually the unselective form. Both have their own place functionally, but what I'm after is the co-polymer of the two, which requires a different process.

What we'll need is an emulsified reaction with radical generators and mercaptan to cap chain lengths. We have soaps, so the emulsification agent shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Theoretically, any mercaptan should work, though I don't know if people would be willing to stand the smell of the lighter ones, so I'll have to see if we can get some heavier carbon chains extracted from the bottom separation product from our existing process. We shouldn't need very much of it, since it's a relatively small portion of the polymer. The radical generators might be a bit more difficult, though potassium persulfate and iron sulfates might work well, and we can produce them with relative ease.

Even when and if that is done though, there will be a lot of polymer testing that will need to be done. I do think we'll be able to do everything though, so I'm going to talk to Zeb about the sorts of things we'll need to produce these things and do lab work. We'll need a proper polymers lab built for testing various properties of plastics we produce. Since even a fraction of a percent change in ratios of any of the items added into a reactor can have direct impact on the final product's properties, there will likely need to be thousands of tests to isolate the best product for different applications.

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The first of the remaining steps, was perhaps the hardest, though honestly, as I worked on these problems, a bit more organic chemistry started to come back to me. Zeolites are, as I've stated before, the preferred catalysts for reactions like this, but they're finicky to produce and require far more advanced methods than we have on hand. Instead, we'll have to settle for catalysts that will slowly get poisoned by the reaction. In an ideal world, that'd be something like aluminum chloride. Unfortunately, we don't have aluminum to produce such a catalysts, since we need the anhydrous forms of any metal chloride catalyst that could work here.

Instead of aluminum chloride though, we can use iron chloride. The process to make the anhydrous form is very straightforward. You heat powdered iron in the presence of chlorine gas. The product is gaseous iron chloride. From there, you separate off the chlorine gas by cooling the product again, solidifying the iron chloride.

It's less efficient, and highly prone to catalytic poisoning, but by halfway through this next semester, I'd gotten the process down in a way that can be used to produce plenty of the stuff. Rather than producing it on our third island, we'll produce it on the mainland, since we naturally recover chlorine gas from our production of sodium hydroxide from sea water.

The nice part is that converting ethylbenzene into styrene uses an iron oxide catalyst with steam at a high temperature, so I had that process wrapped up only a few weeks later after producing ethylbenzene. Something I found was that the process really does need purification steps though. There was enough styrene to self-polymerize during purification, and the temperatures required only increased that problem.

Ultimately, while I'd like if we had polymerization inhibitors to add to the process, we simply don't have them, and that goes well beyond my recalled knowledge of organic chemistry. What we'll have to do instead is have multiple separators that we can use which can be periodically cleaned as they foul from the buildup of polystyrene inside the separation towers. That said, we do have styrene now.

I wasn't sure which of the two remaining things I should work on next, either the mercaptan or radical generators, but I decided mercaptan would be the better of the two to initially focus on, since I wanted to use our larger testing distillation tower for it. Since we're in the middle of classes, it's a good excuse to show students more of this kind of chemistry, if only so that I can determine if any current students will make good fits for further organic chemistry research.

So, since only need a little mercaptan for the process, what I tried to do was tune the separation tower using the bottom pitch material from before to recover a very small amount of only the lightest chains in the mix. Since our initial separations are actually kind of rough, there is going to be a bit of a mix of the middle bits between the tops and bottoms, since most of these chains are soluble in each other. That meant, by trying to boil off only the lightest portion of the bottoms and recovering it, we were able to isolate a very small amount of medium length hydrocarbon chains.

The chains are likely a mixture of all kinds of different compounds with chains branching in different ways and other included oxygen groups on them. What that means is I had to reduce those sorts of groups. By using powdered iron in a hydrogen environment, I can encourage the oxygen groups to move to iron, leaving iron oxides that we'd then reprocess later. In practice, this means that we'll have less active groups in our product. If we also limit the hydrogen gas to a degree, we would expect some of the products to have the necessary carbon-carbon double bonds necessary to turn them into mercaptans.

Right now, I haven't fully figured out exactly what I have from either step, as such, I haven't started trying to react them to produce mercaptans, since I'll need radical generating catalysts, similar to what I need for producing the polymers later, since I need to make bonds active for hydrogen sulfide to react with. The important part is that I have this process largely worked out, so that once I get the last step worked out, I can have someone else work on fine tuning the reactions to produce the mercaptans we want.

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