Acid-Base Synthesis Lab Report

Results and Discussion From the acid-base extraction of unknown #1837, 0.839 g of the crude white solid was produced. The acidic compound extracted was pearl-like in color with a bubbly, thin, and flaky appearance. The other product, the crude colorless liquid neutral compound extracted totaled 0.904 g after evaporating the solvent through the rotary evaporator. Once the crude white solid was recrystallized, the flaky, glazed, and shiny white product weighed 0.240 g. The white shiny product had a slightly foul, acidic odor. When the liquid was distilled, the colorless product totaled 2.02 g. Initially relying on the crude solid’s melting point to identify an appropriate solvent for the recrystallization process, the melting point indicated that the unknown acidic solid could potentially be

Since the crude solid’s melting point range coincided with the purified melting point range of the purified solid, the recrystallization process indicates that the compound of interest was the same, only more refined. Both ranges were small, with the recrystallized melting point values being more precise, therefore indicating that the purity was evident. Meanwhile, the distillation for the liquid resulted in two different refractive indexes which varied significantly from each other. While this could be apprehended as a sign of impurity, the large difference between the two refractive indexes of 0.1769 indicates that the distillation process did not produce a very pure liquid from the start. The temperature could have a role in this large difference between the crude and the purified liquid sample as the refractive index can change with temperature 2. Thus, the differences in temperatures from the literature temperature used and the temperatures of the refractive indexes could play a role in the varying