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Melting Point Of Caffeine Lab Report

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The purpose of this experiment is to demonstrate the isolation of a natural product from a biological source using extraction techniques, and to demonstrate purification by sublimation. We are isolating caffeine from tea. The goals of the experiment are to successfully extract caffeine from the tea solution and to further purify it by sublimation. We will find the percent yield and melting point of the caffeine at the end and we will also identify certain functional groups using an infrared spectroscopy and ‘H NMR.
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Procedure: The experiment was a two-day experiment. On the first day, we did steps 1-11. In a 400-milliliter beaker, we placed five tea bags instead of 10, and approximately 150-milliliters of DI water …show more content…

We tried not to shake it too vigorously or we could get an emulsion. An emulsion is a mixture consisting of droplets of one phase suspended in the other. After we shook the mixture we saw that we did get an emulsion and had to get help from our professor. We did not have to wait 15 minutes for the layers to separate as it says in the lab manual in case an emulsion happened. All we had to do was twist the funnel around for a little bit to help them separate. We omitted step 5 because our professor told us which layer was going to be which. The bottom layer is methylene chloride and the top layer is the aqueous layer. We then drained methylene chloride into a 125-milliliter Erlenmeyer flask. A little bit of the aqueous layer did drain with it. We then extracted the aqueous layer with another 20-milliliter portion of methylene chloride and shook it again very gently. We then drained the methylene chloride layer into the same Erlenmeyer flask. Afterwards, we dried them with about 1 gram of anhydrous magnesium sulfate. We let the solution stand for about 10 minutes, swirling it occasionally to complete the drying. With the aqueous layer, we left it in the separatory funnel since we did not need it but kept just in case. We then gravity filtered the methylene chloride solution into a small, pre-weighed 150-milliliter beaker, instead of a 100-milliliter beaker. We used a fluted filter paper to put in a

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