[km]

I have two questions.. I appreciate if anyone could help me..

Say in an article it says 1.90 mmol of some compound (its hippuric acid methyl ester) was dissolved in 0.5 N KOH:EtOH 1:1 v/v (40 ml). (to do ester hydrolysis) Now I want to dissolve 10 mmol of that compound instead of 1.90 mmol .. HOW should i change the ratios?

Also how can i dry THF?!! what  drying agent can i use?! would MgSO4 work?! or KCO3?!

[Doc Oc]

If you're trying to keep the concentration of reagents the same, you should be able to just scale the solvent and other reagents to the same degree (ie; 10 mmol of your starting material is ~5x as much as the 1.9 mmol, so increase everything else by 5x).

If you need rigorously dry THF, you will need to dry it in a still and that's not real easy.

[voidSetup]

For drying solvents, my advisor has instructed me to just flamedry a container and some molecular sieves, then let them cool in a desiccator, pour the solvent onto the sieves and put a septum onto the container.

[Honclbrif]

If you don't have the means to set up a ketyl still, 3A sieves can be used to get solvents quite dry, but you have to do things properly. Check this article out for more info: J. Org. Chem. 2010, 75, 8351–8354.