By looking at our results, even though my partner and I didn’t obtain a high percent recovery for the unknown, we were still able to identified our unknown to be Acenapthene. We know that our unknown B8 is Acenapthene because of its melting range and its color. The unknown B8 was similar to the color of Acenapthene, and the mixed compound (Acenapthene and the recrystallized compound)’s melting range was close to Acenapthene’s literature melting range. With these two points, my partner and I believed our unknown B8 to be Acenapthene. According to our recrystallized vanillin, we know that our vanillin was pure because of its melting range. Our recrystallized vanillin was the same as the literature melting range of the pure vanillin. Lab #1 Post …show more content…
When doing the experiment, some of the mass would be loss at some points. We can improved the percent recoveries by using more solvents to remove the crystals from the flask as much as possible. Its possible that small substances of the crystals were still in the flask. 3. Were the recrystallization effective (did purification result)? The recrystallization was very effective for our recrystallized vanillin because we were able to obtain a similar literature melting range of the vanillin for our recrystallized vanillin. For our unknown compound B8, the recrystallization was effective. However, our recrystallized unknown still have some impurities in it, so that’s why our recrystallized unknown started to melt at a lower temperature. 4. What was the identity of your unknown, how did you come to this conclusion, and how confident are you in your conclusion? The identity of my unknown B8 was Acenapthene. I come to this conclustion because of its melting range and color. I’m confident of the identification of my unknown because the other two melting ranges (Triphenylmethane and Phenanthrene) was too different from its literature melting