A question for the home brewers out there who know a lot of chem. One of the biggest problems with home brewing is verifying that the raw active ingredients you order are in fact what you ordered. You order estradiol enanthate or some other ingredient from a manufacturer, and an unknown white powder shows up at your door. There are crude testing methods available like the melting point test, but they are limited. There are also testing services like janoshik out there, but they're expensive and involve shipping samples internationally. With shipping, testing a single specimen with a service like janoshik can be $100-$200.
I know dedicated dedicated optical spectrophotometers like these exist. While accurate, these units are big, bulky, expensive, and not really suitable for the kinds of simple compact labs home brewers use.
I stumbled across this video describing a little cheap spectrometer available from a small shop in China. The videos I can find of it only show measuring the spectra of various light bulbs. However, I'm wondering if it's possible to use such a device to measure the purity of specimens of estradiol enanthate and other HRT medications.
I'm not an expert in spectrometry by any means, but I am aware of the general process. With a dedicated desktop spectrophotometer, you create a calibration/standard curve by measuring the spectrum of solutions of different concentrations prepared with a sample of known purity. Then you use that curve to measure the concentration of your unknown specimen.
But the big desktop units are designed from the ground up to do this. You place solutions in dedicated transparent cuvettes. Everything is in a single fixed unit designed for this purpose.
But is it possible to do something similar using just a simple spectrometer? Could you maybe buy such a spectrometer, bolt it to a surface, and cobble together some means of holding a cuvette? If you could fix the cuvette, light source, and detector a fixed distances from each other, then perhaps you could use such a device to cobble together a basic simple optical spectrophotometer?
Would this actually work? My thought is that while this wouldn't be the most accurate spectrophotometer out there, ultimately it doesn't matter. The goal of testing raws is not to measure their concentration to four significant figures. The goal is simply to verify you have the right compound and to ensure that it hasn't been cut with fillers. Even if such a setup had an error rate of a few percent, this would still be perfectly acceptable for raws testing.
I hope I'm explaining this question well enough. I'm really just wondering if a simple cheap usb spectrometer like this one here could be used or modified into a device that can measure raws concentrations.