Methyl Acetate Distillation Essay

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Discussion
At a constant temperature, a pure liquid has a vapor pressure that describes the pressure of escaped gaseous molecules that exist in equilibrium at the liquid’s surface. Adding energy to a pure liquid gives more molecules the kinetic energy to break the intermolecular forces maintaining the liquid and raises the overall temperature of the liquid. Eventually, adding energy boosts the liquid’s vapor pressure until it equals the surrounding atmospheric pressure. When this occurs, the pure liquid boils at a temperature called the boiling point.

Distillation uses the characteristic boiling points of pure liquids to separate these substances from a mixture. Once a pure liquid reaches its boiling point, it maintains this temperature as …show more content…

However, the measured densities lied below the accepted densities of 0.933 g/mL, 0.900 g/mL, and 0.888 g/mL for methyl acetate, ethyl acetate, and propyl acetate respectively. Refractive indices increased across all groups, including Group 6, from the methyl acetate sample to the propyl acetate sample just as expected from the theoretical refractive index values of the pure liquids. In addition, the refractive index % error calculations of Group 6 indicate that samples 1,3, and 5 produced refractive index values relatively close to the theoretical refractive indices of methyl acetate, ethyl acetate, and propyl acetate respectively. Although no distillation produces a perfectly pure liquid, the lack of relatively constant temperatures seen in the data and plots makes it unlikely that the samples collected by the class distillations had a high level of purity. Evaporation from the samples due to a lack of properly fitting test tube caps also reduced the usefulness of the density and refractive index calculations for determining the closeness of the obtained samples to the pure

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