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will surgica spirit kill human being
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Surgical spirit is meths without the purple dye. It's a mixture of ethanol (the alcohol found in alcoholic drinks) and the highly toxic methanol. Methanol is chosen as a mixture of methanol and ethanol cannot be fully separated by distilation. Because the ethanol is 'denatured', surgical spirit does not attract alcohol duty.
10ml of pure methanol will send you blind, 100ml will kill you, so the short answer is 'yes'.
10ml of pure methanol will send you blind, 100ml will kill you, so the short answer is 'yes'.
Tim123, I'm sorry to say that surgical spirit is NOT "meths without the purple dye". If it was, both surgical spirit and meths would have the same smell and clearly they do not. They distinctive smell of surgical spirit is largely down to the methyl salicylate it contains. See the post cited by scotman for further information.
Methanol and ethanol can be separated completely by distillation although the methods used are far more advanced than the older crude fractional distillation techniques. Besides, distillation is not the only method of separating mixtures of the two alcohols.
A couple of years ago, I walked into a postgraduate organic chemistry lab during a lunch-break to find four students separating ethanol from industrial meths using an ingenious and innovative set-up that legal and illegal distillers would have given their eye-teeth to see. I arranged for a sample to undergo NMR spectroscopy along with other analytical methods and the results showed that the sample was effectively free of methanol. In the opinion of a couple of chemical engineers at my university, the system could be adopted for large-scale separation and the method was transferred to the university science park for appraisal.
Methanol and ethanol can be separated completely by distillation although the methods used are far more advanced than the older crude fractional distillation techniques. Besides, distillation is not the only method of separating mixtures of the two alcohols.
A couple of years ago, I walked into a postgraduate organic chemistry lab during a lunch-break to find four students separating ethanol from industrial meths using an ingenious and innovative set-up that legal and illegal distillers would have given their eye-teeth to see. I arranged for a sample to undergo NMR spectroscopy along with other analytical methods and the results showed that the sample was effectively free of methanol. In the opinion of a couple of chemical engineers at my university, the system could be adopted for large-scale separation and the method was transferred to the university science park for appraisal.
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