Industries that utilize ester compounds are the perfume industry and the flavoring industry for the smells that we smell while we wear perfume and eat things, respectively. Also glass industries use polyesters (like polymethyl acrylate, etcetera) to make glass. In the process of synthesizing an ester, it is important to include a strong acid. The concentrated acid in this experiment was sulfuric acid. The sulfuric acid was used to protonate the oxygen on the carboxyl group of benzoic acid. This promoted the addition of the nucleophile (the methanol) to the double bonded carbon to oxygen. After the nucleophile attacks the double bond, a two-proton transfer occurs and water leaves the molecule to form an ester. The benzoic acid and methanol are in equilibrium with the product. This ester product equilibration leaves a lot of starting material unreacted. The equilibrium is why there would be such a low yield of final product. To drive the reaction to the right and to avoid having too much starting material …show more content…
The IR spectrum for methanol seemed to be correct. There was an -OH group at 3320.0 cm^-1. Also, another signal at 1022.5 cm^-1 represented a C-O bond singlet. Benzoic acid was lacking an alcohol stretch at 3300, which is uncommon for its IR spectrum. A reason it could have been lacking its OH was that it might have been deprotonated, as it is a strong acid. There was a lack of an OH peak for methyl benzoate spectrum, which was good because it supports the idea that this IR spectrum was for the desired product. There was a carbonyl peak at 1717.1 for the student outcome of methyl benzoate, which was probably representative of the ester group in the product. Lastly, there were a few peaks from 3064.3-2840.9 that corresponded to the methyl hydrogens and the aromatic hydrogens: they were represented