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Trimyristin Lab Report

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Aims of Experiment
- To isolate trimyristin from a natural product, named nutmeg, using solvent extraction.
- To purify the isolated trimyristin by recrystallization.
- To get infrared spectrum of the isolated trimyristin.

Introduction
Many natural products such as medicine and cosmetic which are extracted from animals and plants are around us. Like this, Trimyristin, which is composed of triglycerides, is that it can be isolated from nutmeg seed. It is widely used as hair conditioner or oil. One of the important method to extract pure trimyristin from nutmeg is reflux condenser. The reflux condenser is used in case that we want to prevent organic compound with volatile substance or solvent from being evaporated while heating and cooling occur …show more content…

After setting the apparatus, put 15g of ground nutmeg seed and 40ml of acetone into the 100ml round bottom flask. Then, put the flask into the heating mantle and heated it up for 15 minutes while shaking smoothly. During this process, made hot water to preheat the stemless funnel and conical flask to about 80 ℃ and also made 32-fold filter paper. After 15 minutes, keeping our solution in 100ml round bottom flask hot with heating mantle, poured our solution into filter paper in the preheated stemless funnel and conical flask smoothly. Added 15ml of acetone to wash the residue and poured all liquid of our solution. Then, placed extracted liquid into an ice bath to get crystallized and after putting some acetone on the flask, isolated the solid material by suction filtration using Buchner …show more content…

Then filtered the solution quickly with the stemless funnel, 32-fold filter paper and conical flask. To get more colorless liquid, repeated this process 3 times. Then, placed the conical flask in an ice bath and waited until crystallization finished. Isolated the purified product by suction filtration. Finally, put half spoon of recrystallized product and Nujol powder in an agate mortar and grinded finely. Then, made the mull and transferred the mull to the bottom salt plate of a demountable cell. Then run the spectrum.

Precautions
Acetone, which used to mix with ground nutmeg seed and wash the residue, is not very toxic but highly flammable and also has easily evaporable property. From this reason, we have to pay special attention to flame around us when doing experiment.
Paraffin, which composes paraffin oil, is also flammable so that it can catch fire easily.
When adding ground nutmeg seed, acetone and heating it with heating mantle, it is important to gently swirl the solution to avoid bumping. It can be more secure to add anti-bumping

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