A startup company is trying to produce its own brand of antibacterial ointment.

Question

A startup company is trying to produce its own brand of antibacterial ointment. It decides to analyze a generic brand already on the market so that it can make suitable modifications to the chemical composition. It is known that the generic ointment contains benzoic acid (the active ingredient), benzhydrol (the fixative) and anisole, which adds fragrance. You are part of a development team that wishes to separate these three substances in order to determine their relative proportions in the ointment, as well as to discover any inactive or unlisted constituents. Some members of your team were able to isolate the inactive ingredients; however, tests reveal that you still have a mixture of benzoic acid, benzhydrol and anisole left unseparated. As a member of the team, you have been asked to do the following: 1. Design an experiment to separate the following compounds from a mixture using any combination of purification techniques (TLC, Column Chromatography, Extraction, and Recrystallization). (The functional group in anisole is an ether.) benzoic acid benzhydrol anisole 2. Carry out characterization studies such as melting point to confirm that your purification was successful. 3. Determine the percent recovery of the individual components of the mixture. Mixture originally contains: 0.5g benzoic acid 0.25g benzhydrol 0.25 mL anisole 10 mL diethyl ether

1. What is the main goal/purpose of the experiment?

2. What are the melting points and boiling points of the three compounds?

3. Develop a separation strategy. First draw a flowchart to describe how your separation will be conducted. Then write the detailed experimental procedure. Be sure to include how many mls of what solvent/liquid or how many grams of what solid you will use in each step.

4. What data that will be collected in the experiment? That is, what do you plan to record in your notebook? When you can get together with your lab partner(s), add the initials of the student who is performing that step in the procedure. For example:

1. Weigh substance- YI (your initials)

2. Get the volume of substance- PI (your partner’s initials)

3. Etc.

Explanation / Answer

1) Main goal is to produce antibacterial ointment.

2) The melting points of three compounds are:

Benzoic acid: 122.41 oC

Benzahydrol:69 oC

Anisole: -37 oC

Boiling points of three compounds are:

Benzoic acid: 249.2 oC

Benzahydrol: 298 oC

Anisole: 153.8 oC

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