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Separation Of Caffeine

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Alkaloids occur naturally and considered an organic compound that provides many benefits for both humans and animals. Nevertheless, alkaloids embrace caffeine as a member of the family, which exists in many natural drinks and manufactured drinks. Furthermore, the extraction of caffeine was done through the previous experiment in which boiling water and dichloromethane separated the organic layer and sodium carbonate worked on excluding the Tannins acid. Later on, caffeine was completely extracted by removing the solution via heating (Rains, 2016). Proceeding with experiment, the duration of boiling for tea was eight minutes whereas for coffee, boiling duration was fifteen minutes. Moreover, after boiling process, both liquids were transferred to a separatory funnel and was inverted for a total of four times and vented after every invertion to allow for the accumulation of undesired gas to …show more content…

However, when dividing the actual yield by the actual yield (0.2), the percent yield gave a result of 0.4g. The amount of caffeine obtained is lower than the theoretical yield. Therefore, from the obtained results, it was concluded that several sources of error were done during the performance of the experiment. Such sources of error could arise from the extraction process. Meaning, During the extraction process of caffeine from tea from the seperetory funnel, the caffeine may not fully be extracted from tea. Accordingly, there might be some caffeine left in the seperatory funnel and therefore yielded a lower yield than the theoretical yield. Another source of error could be that during the extraction process, some leakage of caffeine must have been done and took several seconds for participants to notice and therefore that leakage could cause a great loss of the total amount of caffeine and accordingly yields a lower yield than the theoretical

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