Can’t figure out too simple thing
Well, it was really ashamed when you are in the lab and not knowing what chemical reaction took places. We are too much dependent on the literature, lab manual or what-so-ever. Here I was making the precursor for rare-earth trifluoroacetate with some deionized water as a solvent.
It is high school chemistry and I completely forgot about it.
metal oxides + acid -> salt + water
Here metal oxides is just a base. Similarly ; metal oxides + trifluoroacetate acid -> metal trifluoroacetate + water.
The same holds true for metal oleate. It’s just here trifluoroacetic acid and oleate acid are weak base (partially soluble), hence we need some kind of solvent and cook them at 110 C until they all dissolve. The excess trifluoroacetatic acid (bp 72.4 C) and water can be vaporized using rotavapor.
My brain is a bit rusty. (even rust is just simple redox reaction)
