Posted 07 August 2012 - 07:25 PM
This is my first post on the forum (I've been lurking), so take it easy on me! My background--got my Ph.D. working on fullerenes. I synthesized them in arc reactors that we built, extracted them from soot, purified them, and studied their electronic structure and reactivity with many methods. So I do have some background in the area.
We ran into Andrievsky, the guy who has done the lion's share of work on hydrated fullerenes, at a conference in 2003 in St. Petersburg Russia. At that time, he was preaching the gospel of HyFn to the extent of carrying around vials of concentrated HyFn in his shirt pocket and showing and telling to anyone who would listen that the stuff would cure all ills. I was asked by my prof to reproduce his results, so I made a lot of his stuff and characterized it by spectroscopy, dynamic laser scattering, electron microscopy, etc. My results matched Andrievsky's, so I was convinced. Took one tiny swig of the stuff back then but didn't have the guts to try more. I also reproduced the THF into water method as well.
Fast forward to this last month. A large rat aquaintance of mine has had acute gall bladder problems, and cannot digest most oils, so dosing with C60-OO is not an option. I dusted off Andrievsky's method and made about 250 ml of semi-concentrated HYFN for him. He will begin taking it within days, so we'll see if it has any positive effects.
The method is fairly straightforward, though you need a horn ultrasonicator for best results. Without getting into the nitty gritty details, a layer of low to medium concentrated filtered C60-toluene solution is layered on top of a much larger volume of water, and directly sonicated near the interface for several hours while controlling the temperature. The sonic energy should not be too high or you'll lose too much product to a hard-to-separate emulsion. You can either wait until the toluene evaporates or use a separation funnel to recover the aqueous portion, which is yellow. Then you filter, concentrate as you wish, and filter again. If done correctly, the solution should be yellow and transparent, since most of the product will be tiny clusters of water-complexed C60 from 1-3 molecules, with a small percentage as larger clusters. The THF method (which is the only one to show toxic effects in organisms) and other methods such as direct mixing into water yield much larger clusters from 30-200 nm in size. The sonication from toluene method seems to be the best to produce bioavailable, non-toxic product since the single fullerenes are already fully solvated by toluene at relatively low concentrations in that solvent, and the sonic energy simply exchanges the solvent for water.
Buying second-hand lab equipment to make this product is far less expensive than buying it from Ukraine! It is a lot more work than C60-OO, however, and what remains to be seen is if there are advantages to the HyFn when compared with the oil-solubilized version.
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