Abstract The extraction of caffeine (C8H10N402) was done in two parts. The first procedure used was solid-liquid extraction which was done by boiling the tea leaves in 100 ml. distilled water for 5-10 minutes. The filtrate was acquired and was extracted again by liquid-liquid extraction using dichloromethane (CH2Cl2). The combined DCM (CH2Cl2) was washed and dried to yield crude caffeine. The crude caffeine was purified by sublimation and the percentage yield was calculated by solving the ratio of the weight of the pure caffeine and weight of the tea leaves used. The computed percentage of caffeine was 0.12%. The temperature range of the pure caffeine was 215-220 °C.
Introduction Caffeine is an alkoid that belongs to the methylxanthine family. It is naturally produced by over 60 plant species. One of the products that contain caffeine is tea leaves. Aside from caffeine tea leaves also contain other organic compounds namely tannins, cellulose and flavonoids. Extraction is the process of obtaining something from a mixture or compound using chemical, physical, or mechanical means. The theory of extraction lies in the concept of immiscibility between two phases to separate a solute from the other phase. There are two types of extraction: solid-liquid and liquid-liquid. These two types of extraction were used in the experiment to obtain the following objectives: to isolate caffeine from tea leaves, to purify the isolated caffeine, to characterize caffeine and to compute the percentage yield of caffeine in tea leaves.
Methodology The first step that was done was the extraction of crude caffeine from 3 bags of tea leaves. The brand of the tea bags used was Lipton Yellow Label Tea. The tea leaves were taken first from the tea bags to measure the weight of the tea leaves. The lid of the tea bags were cut to obtain the tea leaves. The tea leaves were weighed using the use of analytical