I am having trouble extracting oil from my simulated in vitro test environments. In these, are water maxtures of waters/sand/soil/gravel/oil and my test substance. Currently i am trying to extract the oil using Petroleum Ether, however the substance I am testing is reducing the the ammount of oil being stripped, also the sand/soil is blocking my separation funnel .

 

Does anyone know another way to extract the oil?

 

Help appreciated

Merlin']I am having trouble extracting oil from my simulated in vitro test environments. In these' date=' are water maxtures of waters/sand/soil/gravel/oil and my test substance. Currently i am trying to extract the oil using Petroleum Ether, however the substance I am testing is reducing the the ammount of oil being stripped, also the sand/soil is blocking my separation funnel .

 

Does anyone know another way to extract the oil?

 

Help appreciated[/quote']

 

Am I right in assuming that you need to create a method that would also work in the real world? Are you trying to extract "new" oil, or are you trying to remove contaminated oil from soil?

Why not just filter the soil, using the ether?

Fractional Distilation of Water And Oil? Chromotography?

couldn`t you use a centrifuge?

 

the sand and soil will be at the bottom, water in the middle and the oil at the top

well if its a centrefuge wouldnt the oil be in the middle of the CF, the water outside the oil and the sand even further out on the edge.

ed if you are using a simple centrifuge, mechanical or electrical, inside, while rotating the configuration is as you describe. Stop the centrifuge and remove the sample container and it matches YTs description. It's all depends on POV.

Yes I am looking at the microbail degradation of oil and I need to see how much oil is left from a recorded innoculum of oil.

 

I thought about centrifuging, however you can not use glass tubes for centrifugation since they will crack. I cant use plastic ones as the P ether willl melt the plastic. Unless I can find a resistant plastic, even then the oil is polar and will stick to the plasic with great affinity making it hard to extract once more.

Why not try another solvent that won't dissolve the plastic tubes?

just boil it

just boil it

 

and what will that do?

 

Other than oxidise the oil making it even stickier (gell like) and then you`ll have TONS of fun trying to remove it from the sand!

 

his idea of a solvent is a good 1`st step.

 

question for the OP, does it matter if the oil gets destroyed at all?

 

I was thinking, how about saponifying it to make a detergent, and then flushing it with clean water?