Phenylacetone Methylamine

 

The government cottoned on to the fact that you can make methamphetamine from phenylacetone quite a long time ago, and made it a controlled substance. Walt clearly knows this, as he doesn’t have Jesse try to buy some but rather opts to make it himself. There are several ways to make phenylacetone, but it sounds like Walt will be reacting phenylacetic acid with acetic acid (the acid that’s in vinegar) as he requires both a tube furnace and a thorium nitrate catalyst (Th(NO₃)₄); an unusual choice, as it’s radioactive and a manganese-based catalyst should work just as well).

 

Preparation of phenylacetone from phenylacetic acid and acetic acid

So far, so industrial-scale good. However, our chemists quickly run up against a DEA wall when they find that the anhydrous methylamine they need to do the reductive amination is also a controlled substance. Time to think about producing it from ammonia (NH₃) and methanol(CH₃OH)? No, it’d make better television to steal it.

 

Thermite

Just how does one go about recycling an old Etch-A-Sketch? To Jesse, it’s just another piece of junk cluttering up his garage, but to Walt it’s a source of aluminium powder. An Etch-A-Sketch is quite simple in operation – there’s a thin coating of fine aluminium powder sticking to the plastic screen, and the knobs move a stylus that scrapes it off. The lines we see are therefore areas without aluminium powder, which allow us to see through to the dark interior. When the Etch-A-Sketch is shaken, polystyrene beads help to redistribute the powder evenly over the surface of the screen again.

Why is aluminium powder so important? As Walt later explains, he’s making thermite – a mixture of a metal powder and a metal oxide. Such a mixture is not explosive, but will create extremely high temperatures around a small area – it’s often used to weld sections of railway line together in locations inconvenient for conventional welding equipment. The reaction requires some kind of heat source to get started (Walt and Jesse use a gas torch), and then the metal powder is simply oxidised by the oxygen in the metal oxide in a classic redox reaction.

In this episode, Walt is probably using iron(III) oxide due to its easy availability:

Fe₂O₃ + 2Al → 2Fe + Al₂O₃ + heat

This reaction would reach around 2500 °C, easily enough to melt through the steel padlock on the storeroom door. Too bad the guys didn’t bring a trolley along.

Walt also makes reference to the Gustav Gun, an enormous railway cannon used by the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union during World War II. It was destroyed in 1945 to prevent its capture by advancing Allied troops – if a thermite-packing commando had actually disabled it all by himself, someone would have made a film about it by now.

 

 

Oldal: Phenylacetone Methylamine
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