Triethylamine

About This Product

Triethylamine, formula C6H15N and CAS number 121-44-8, is a tertiary aliphatic amine. It is a clear, colourless to pale yellow liquid with a strong ammoniacal, fishy odour, boiling at about 89 °C and partly miscible with water. Its usefulness comes from being a base strong enough to neutralise acids but, having no hydrogen on the nitrogen, unable to be acylated itself. In reactions of acid chlorides, sulphonyl chlorides and chloroformates it captures the hydrogen chloride released, forming triethylamine hydrochloride, which usually precipitates and is filtered off, driving the reaction to completion. For that reason primary and secondary amine impurities, which would form their own amides, are the limits that matter in synthesis grades. In foundries it has a quite different role: blown as a vapour through sand coated with phenolic urethane binder, it catalyses the cure in seconds at room temperature, the basis of the cold-box process for making cores. It is used as an acid scavenger and base catalyst in pharmaceutical and agrochemical synthesis, as the cold-box catalyst in foundry core production, and in quaternary ammonium compounds, herbicide amine salts, rubber accelerators and corrosion inhibitors. Bio Green Chem supplies triethylamine at 99.5 percent minimum in 140 kg drums or ISO tanks, with the full specification on assay, water, colour and related amines confirmed with the quotation. It is highly flammable, corrosive to skin and eyes and toxic by inhalation; handle to the safety data sheet.