Aspirin Synthesis Lab Report
1. What is the more formal chemical name for aspirin?
Acetylsalicylic acid
2. Using your data from Experiment 2, how can you be sure you synthesized aspirin? By using the colors as a guide, we can compare the Acetylsalicylic acid + 8 mL FeCl3 to the Aspirin Crystals from Experiment 1 + 8 mL FeCl3 in order to see if it synthesized.
3. Would you say that your synthesized aspirin is relatively pure? How can you tell?
One way that the purity of aspirin can be judged is by it's color as pure acetylsalicylic acid is a brown color. I would say my synthesized aspirin is relatively pure but it is not fully the brown color since some of the salicylic acid remains adding a light purple shade.
4. What could have caused your percent yield to
be less than 100%? In other words, what are sources of experimental error?
The biggest risk is human error during the experiment. It includes using a little bit too much or too little of an element (maybe you put 11 mL when you needed 12 mL), stopping the reaction before it has completely reacted, and improperly recording your data. Another error that is non human based is the fact that regardless with the transfers involved during the experiment, you are bound to lose even a small amount of overhead which will affect your ultimate outcome.
5. What could have caused your percent yield to be more than 100%? In other words, what could have made it seem like you had more than you really did?
There are multiple things which can result in yield that appears to be over 100% of it's theoretical max. One is that you used more reactant than which you were suppose to which can give the result that it yielded over 100%. Another situation that is likely is that you had a measuring issue where you incorrectly measured too much (10ml when it was 8ml) which makes it appear that your yield is higher than it should be.
Acetylsalicylic acid
2. Using your data from Experiment 2, how can you be sure you synthesized aspirin? By using the colors as a guide, we can compare the Acetylsalicylic acid + 8 mL FeCl3 to the Aspirin Crystals from Experiment 1 + 8 mL FeCl3 in order to see if it synthesized.
3. Would you say that your synthesized aspirin is relatively pure? How can you tell?
One way that the purity of aspirin can be judged is by it's color as pure acetylsalicylic acid is a brown color. I would say my synthesized aspirin is relatively pure but it is not fully the brown color since some of the salicylic acid remains adding a light purple shade.
4. What could have caused your percent yield to
be less than 100%? In other words, what are sources of experimental error?
The biggest risk is human error during the experiment. It includes using a little bit too much or too little of an element (maybe you put 11 mL when you needed 12 mL), stopping the reaction before it has completely reacted, and improperly recording your data. Another error that is non human based is the fact that regardless with the transfers involved during the experiment, you are bound to lose even a small amount of overhead which will affect your ultimate outcome.
5. What could have caused your percent yield to be more than 100%? In other words, what could have made it seem like you had more than you really did?
There are multiple things which can result in yield that appears to be over 100% of it's theoretical max. One is that you used more reactant than which you were suppose to which can give the result that it yielded over 100%. Another situation that is likely is that you had a measuring issue where you incorrectly measured too much (10ml when it was 8ml) which makes it appear that your yield is higher than it should be.