preview

Separation Of Benzil Lab Report

Decent Essays

There are various techniques to separate a mixture of compounds from each other. One of the commonly used way to isolate compounds from a mixture of two compounds is called extraction. This method of extracting two compounds from each other relies on the different solubility of the compounds in two different solvents.
The objective of this experiment is to separate a 50:50 mixture of benzoic acid and benzil by using macroscale extraction. In the experiment, organic solvent diethyl ether is used. After adding 1.0 gram of the 50:50 mixture of benzoic acid and benzil to a 25ml Erlenmeyer flask, diethyl ether was added to the flask to dissolve the mixture. Benzoic acid and benzil dissolve in diethyl ether. Once the mixture dissolved in …show more content…

Finally, the ether layer of the solution was collected in a separate flask for the extraction of benzil.
Different procedures were used to isolate benzil from the ether layer and benzoic acid from the aqueous layers. To isolate benzil, anhydrous MgSO4 was added to the flask containing the ether layer solution. MgSO4 removes the remaining water in the ether layer solution. After making sure that enough amount of MgSO4 present in the solution, the ether solution was filtered by using gravity filtration. During filtration, MgSO4 was removed from the solution and the ether solution was collected in 25 ml flask. To separate benzil from the filtered ether solution, the beaker containing the ether solution was heated until the ether evaporated. After letting the beaker to cool to room temperature, the mass of the beaker with the benzil crystals was measured. From the combined mass of the beaker and the benzil crystals and from the predetermined mass of the beaker, the mass of the collected crystals was calculated to be 0.266 gram.
The original 1.0 gram of the 50/50 mixture of the benzoic acid and benzil contain 0.5 gram of benzil. Thus, from 0.5 gram of benzil, only 0.266 gram of benzil was collected. The percent recovery of benzil was calculated to be 53.2%. This low percent recovery could be due to filtration errors. Some amount of benzil remained on the filtration paper that contained the MgSO4. In order for determining the purity of the

Get Access