Acetylsalicylic Acid Lab Report

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We made Acetylsalicylic Acid by reacting Salicylic Acid and Acetic Anhydride. We conducted a series of tests which included white powder comparison, melting point, Iron (Ⅲ) ion, and spectrophotometer to determine the purity. All these tests indicated that we had some amount of contamination. By combining the results of our tests, and spectrophotometer readings, we concluded that our sample was not very pure. We calculated that we had about 14% Salicylic Acid in our purified sample. We claim that a safe dose of our aspirin to take is 7.06 milligrams or 84.72 milligrams in day. Introduction: Acetylsalicylic Acid or more commonly known as aspirin, is a nonsteroidal drug used as a moderate pain reliever, a fever reducer and for anti-inflammatory …show more content…

To make aspirin, we reacted Salicylic Acid (C7H6O3) and Acetic Anhydride (C4H6O3) to make Acetylsalicylic Acid (C9H8O4) and Acetic Acid (C2H4O2). To start we made a 1000 milliliter boiling water bath using a hotplate that was warm enough to keep the water boiling. We put 4.00 grams of Salicylic Acid and 10.0 milliliters of Acetic Anhydride in a 250 milliliter Erlenmeyer flask. Then we carefully added in 10 drops of concentrated Sulfuric Acid (H2SO4) as a catalyst for the reaction. Next we suspended the flask in the boiling water for the full 10 minutes to ensure a complete reaction. We then removed the flask from the boiling water bath and let it cool. When cool, we added 4 milliliters of water dropwise into the solution and swirled. After swirling for a few minutes, we added 80 milliliters of distilled water and stirred the solution with a glass rod until crystals began to form. Once we noticed crystallization, we placed the flask into an ice water bath for 10 minutes in order for crystallization to continue. Using filter paper and a funnel, we filtered the Acetylsalicylic Acid crystals from the solution of Salicylic Acid and Acetic Acid. We rinsed the crystals twice with 10 milliliters of water each time. We then split our sample in half and purified one …show more content…

In our experiment we reacted Salicylic Acid (C7H6O3) and Acetic Anhydride (C4H6O3) to make Acetylsalicylic Acid (C9H8O4) and Acetic Acid (C2H4O2). We used Sulfuric Acid (H2SO4) as a catalyst in the reaction. To calculate the limiting reagent we figured that 4.00 grams of Salicylic Acid is 0.02897081 moles. For Acetic Anhydride, we found that the conversion to grams is 1.08 grams per milliliter. We used that to find that in 10 milliliters of Acetic Anhydride we had 10.8 grams or 0.10584085 moles. The ratio of the coefficients are 1:1 so there should be the same amount of moles for Acetic Anhydride and Salicylic Acid. Since the moles are not the same, Salicylic Acid is the limiting reagent and Acetic Anhydride is the excess reagent. We expected to have 7.84 grams excess of Acetic Anhydride. We predicted that we would make 5.23 grams of Acetylsalicylic Acid and 1.66 milliliters of Acetic Acid. We actually made 1.61 grams of aspirin and we did not measure the amount of Acetic Anhydride

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