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Nucleophilic Substitution Lab Report

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A unimolecular nucleophilic substitution of t-amyl alcohol should be done to convert into t-amyl chloride through extraction and simple distillation. A concentrated hydrochloric acid was added to the reactant to force the reaction to take place. Infrared spectroscopy was utilized to verify that the contents of the tert-amyl chloride should be different from the starting material.
In this reaction, a rate-determining step should occur through the ionization between carbon and –OH bond to form an intermediate.11 This step should be followed by rapid reaction of a nucleophile to wrap up the substitution.11 For this experiment, hydrochloric acid was used to drive off the reaction, which contains a chlorine ion, a common nucleophile. (1)Chlorine ion is more effective as a nucleophile than water; because an ion holds a negative charge and resulting in a faster rate of reaction, whereas water holds a neutral charge, resulting in a slower rate of reaction with a carbocation intermediate.13 The starting …show more content…

One supporting evidence is that the resulting infrared spectra in Figure 2 for the product still contains an OH stretch of 3343 cm-1. In fact, the stretch of OH in the product is broader than the stretch of the starting material in Figure 1. This could imply that the layers in the separatory funnel initially did not form, although a lot of time has taken to settle. Adding 10% sodium chloride to the mixture helped to form layers, but that does not necessarily mean that the –OH group had completely separated from the carbocation. And so, the resulting product is not pure. Furthermore, it is expected that the C-Cl stretch (between 850 to 550 cm-1) and C-H wag (1300-1150 cm-1) should appear on Figure 2, but that did not happen. Moreover, the reaction failed since the amount of tert-amyl alcohol used was not a lot enough to form an expected

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