Can you mix mineral spirits and isopropyl alcohol?

Answer 1

YesYes. The two can be mixed safely.

I just made and used a solution of 1 cup alcohol, 1 cup water and 2 Tbl. white vinegar to clean my bathroom. I works very well.

NO

No. The two cannot be mixed safely.

They produce diethyl ether in liquid form that starts escaping as a gas. Ths is commonluy just called ether and is an anesthetic that can put you to sleep.

Answer 2

Short answer:

Yes, almost certainly, but maybe not in your case.

Quickly - While methanol and to a certain degree ethanol, may be insoluble in petroleum distillate products and not mix if poured into the same container, isopropanol generally mixes with simple alkanes of the kind that make up mineral spirits.

An explanation, elaboration, and VERY IMPORTANT CAVEATS:

Mineral spirits are basically a hodgepodge of volatile organic compounds that come from crude oil. This product is not a single chemical; it's manufactured by distilling crude oil and collecting all the chemicals of a certain (low) boiling point range. Companies could go to the trouble of purifying them further, but this product is good enough for the purposes it's sold for and it's cheap. These chemicals are generally simple hydrocarbons, which are just molecules of carbon and hydrogen and you might think of as similar to gasoline (octane) from a solubility standpoint. Simple alkanes are very non-polar, and will not dissolve in polar solvents like water.

Alcohols are defined as being alkanes that have one extra thing on it; a so-called hydroxyl group of oxygen and hydrogen -OH. Basically this group is polar; it acts like water and prefers polar solvents. However, the other part of the molecule is still just like the grease. In the end, an alcohol's polarity is all a balancing act between the two parts. Basically, the more carbon on an alcohol, the less polar it is because the polar stuff makes up an increasingly smaller fraction of the molecule than the non-polar stuff. In order of decreasing polarity:

CH3-OH (methanol) > CH3CH2-OH (ethanol) > CH3CH2CH2-OH (propanol) etc.

Methanol is quite polar because it only has one greasy carbon to balance out its polar hydroxyl function. Ethanol is a little less so, by the time you get to (iso)-propanol--the iso- just refers to positioning the oxygen on the middle, not the ends, of a three carbon chain--the alcohol is likely non-polar enough to be soluble in petroleum spirits.

I'm a synthetic organic chemist, so I have some experience to relate (though products like 'mineral spirits' are too impure for most of our purposes, so we instead use the purified, contsituent parts). Hexane(s) (which is/are carbon and hydrogen molecules where the total number of carbons per molecule is 6) and methanol are immiscible, but pure ethanol 'will' mix with hexanes, though the solution is cloudy at first. Pure isopropanol definitely mixes with hexanes; this is a common mixture used for the separation of compounds through liquid chromatography.

Based on that, your mineral spirits and isopropanol should definitely, definitely, definitely mix...

BUT!!! Unfortunately, if you aren't a chemist you may not have access to pure enough materials, and your specific samples may not mix:

You don't actually know what's in your mineral spirits, so you can't be sure if there is something (like a polymer, for example) that makes it less polar, or something (like oxygenated compounds) that makes it more polar. However, it's an industrial product so it's reasonable to assume it's decently pure, and pales in comparison to the problem of:

WATER!

You'll never, ever, ever get water to mix with mineral spirits. And water is probably a large constituent of your isopropanol solution available commercially. Just 5% water might make the difference between soluble and not. Off the shelf isopropyl alcohol at a pharmacy is rarely above 91%. I'm guessing that this is too much water.

As a matter of further explanation, alcohols have a tendency to 'get wet' when very pure, which is to say, draw in significant amounts of water from the ambient atmosphere. For this reason, it's very tough to make or preserve waterless (anhydrous) alcohol, making it much, much more expensive than is reasonable for rubbing alcohol. If, however, you purchased very pure isopropanol from a hardware store, say, or a chemical supplier, you would have no trouble mixing it with mineral spirits.