preview

Mixture Of Ortho And Para Nitrophenol Lab Report

Decent Essays

During this experiment the crude product (mixture of ortho and para nitrophenols) was run through a column chromatography. The point of the column chromatography was to separate the nitrophenols and purify them. During the experiment the crude product was ran through the silica with two different solvents. 60:40 DCM/hexanes was used to form the first band while 50:50 DCM/EtOAc was used to form the second band. The reason for this method was that there had to be a change in solvent for the para product because since it is polar it was expected to run very slowly through the column and therefore needed a more polar solvent to speed it up, ethyl acetate. As expected two different yellow bands were observed. Each band represented one of the nitrophenols, with the bottom band being the ortho-nitrophenol since it is less polar and stayed within the solvent and therefore ran through the column quickly. The para product stayed at the top because it was similarly polar to the Silica and had the ability to hydrogen bond to it. Once the bands were formed fractions were taken from the yellow bands. Fraction 1-5 was from the ortho product and fractions 6-10 were from the para product. The fractions formed were than ran through TLC chromatography to test the true purity of the products and the success of the column chromatography separation. The first TLC plate containing fractions 1-5, surprisingly did not have any spots (Figure 1b). This is was unexpected because fractions 1-5 were

Get Access