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Mike West

How can diethyl ether be miscible with water?

Dave Saruya  Follow

Diethyl ether is miscible with water only in small amounts (up to 6% or so). As it says in the wikipedia page:

Diethyl ether is a common laboratory solvent. It has limited solubility in water (6.05 g/100 ml at 25 °C) and dissolves 1.5 g/100 ml water at 25 °C. This, coupled with its high volatility, makes it ideal for use as the non-polar solvent in liquid-liquid extraction.

For practical purposes, it is regarded as a slightly more polar alkane - that is, it is pretty much immiscible with water (and will form a separate layer), but is more polar than hexane, heptane, or other common alkanes, which means it will dissolve a broader range of organics.

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