4-Methyl-Acetophenone Lab Report

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For this experiment, we reduced a ketone to a secondary alcohol. During the first week, everyone ran the reaction using 9-fluoreneone. The ketones for week 2 were derivatives of acetophenone, and my group elected to test the differences in reactivity between acetophenone, 4-methyl-acetophenone, and 4-bromo-acetophenone. We hypothesized that the differences in reactivity would be affected by the electronegativity of substituent. Therefore, we predicted that the 4-bromoacetophenone react the fastest since bromine is a more electronegative substituent, followed by 4-methyl-acetophenonoe, and acetophenone. For the most part, we followed the procedure from week 1. After dissolving 0.1g of 4-bromoacetophenone in 2ml of 95% ethanol, I cooled the solution in an ice bath and added 20mg of …show more content…

At the 3-minute mark, the least polar ketone was the 3-methyl-aceetophenone with a starting material (SM) Rf of 0.76 and reaction solution (RXN) Rf of 0.75. It makes sense that the ketone with the methyl substituent was less polar than the one with bromine, (SM Rf = 0.56 and RXN Rf= 0.56, 0.42). There is likely some error in TLC plates with either spotting, incorrect measurements of distance traveled by solvent, and impurities in the reaction that could have contributed to this mixture of retention time. This is supported by the fact that there were impurities, multiple spots, in the reaction lane for acetophenone and 4-bromo-acetophenone. However, for 3 of the 5 trials, the bromine substituted ketones had the lowest Rf, supporting its polar properties. Additionally, the acetophenone had the highest Rf for three of the trials, indicating that it is the least polar. However, since there were no patterns in the TLC with 4-methyl-acetopehone it was not too helpful in confidently analyzing reactivity. Lastly, we looked at IR data to see if the reactions ran to

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