ames00 Posted September 30, 2007 Share Posted September 30, 2007 'm doing my organic lab report and there are two questions I have no idea how to do. I've asked the prof. but he takes forever to email me back so...... The questions: Write equations showing how caffeine could be extracted from an organic solvent and subsequently isolated. Write equations showing how acetaminophen might be extracted from an organic solvent such as an ether, if it were soluble. how would you go about doing this??? would you use a simple reaction equation with reactants and then products? we used dicholormethane to extract the caffiene from tea so would you take the caffeine molecular structure + dichloromethane= the products?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred56 Posted October 2, 2007 Share Posted October 2, 2007 This is a straightforward solubility problem. You need to find out about the solubility of the "products" of interest: in this case caffiene and acetaminophen, in different solvents. Then you need to select a solvent which has a different density than the one the product is dissolved in, so you get two "phases" of liquid, usually one organic and one aqueous phase. One solvent will contain the product you wish to extract, the other will extract the product from this because the product is more soluble in the extracting solvent. All the info should be available in the Merck index, or somewhere on the web maybe. I'll leave the details of preparing an aqueous solvent to extract an amine from an organic solution up to you. Wikipedia should also tell you all about caffiene, acetaminophen and their solubilities. Caffiene is an alkaloid (actually an amine) and these have been extracted from plants using slightly acidic solutions for quite a while now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greysteel_M6 Posted October 9, 2007 Share Posted October 9, 2007 google it, it's popular Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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