Anyone care to explain the purpose of this contraption? Or was it especially designed to represent a fluid heavy group activity?
I would guess that this expensive looking piece of probably custom made glassware is used with some highly reactive chemicals where you wouldn’t want to open it up to the atmosphere to add reagents. I could imagine a reflux condenser in the middle. The surrounding ports would each serve a specific purpose.
So - Here’s an imaginary setup: You fill the main chamber with a solvent and maybe some boiling beads and a stir bar. One or more of the ports could be rigged up to include a thermometer or other probe. A sampling probe might be handy, for example. You’d start it up and add one or two liquid reagents via addition funnels connected to other ports. Let it run for however long, then either add the quenching agent or additional reagents.
This suggests that this is a well established (if small scale) process because there’d be no intermediate purification step.
Two and three necked versions of these are pretty common. This vessel is batshit, though. This also leads me to an alternate theory. Similar to one proposal for the roman dodecahedrons, this could be a glassblower’s master thesis.
Looks like they are bong down stems. So an adapter to fit a dozen bowls on a bong?
This is the correct answer
Another forum said cyclic voltametry or however it’s spelled, but it was just a guess
I’m not a chemist or whatever but my first thought was if you routinely needed a lot of something that was safer to make and distill in small batches at a distance from each other.
if it’s too heat sensitive to distill then vacuum distillation is an option, but size of batch won’t matter too hard
if it really can’t be done, then there are ways to make it work without distillation
gotta be some kind of air-free electrochemical setup, i agree
No idea what it’s actually for but I’d definitely put a bowl of weed in the middle and hoses on all the others and make a bong/hookah hybrid if such a thing were to appear in my possession.
