Lab 2 Chm 255 Purdue

How can Extraction Be Used to Isolate a Natural Product from Nutmeg?

Viraj G.

Due Date: September 26, 2013

Date Submitted: September 26, 2013

Purpose of the Experiment: We want isolate trimyristin which is a natural product found in nutmeg by using extraction techniques.

Reaction Equations:

Calculations: (Percent Recovery of Trimyristin)

Results:

- Recovered trimyrisitn which appeared to be a light orange color. Very brittle when touched. (Trimyristin is an ester formed from glycerol and myristic acid.)

- Started with 8 grams of nutmeg but only about 20 percent was actual trimyristin. The rest is made of many different ingredients.

-Actual start of trimyristin in the Nutmeg was 1.6 grams and we extracted .320 grams of the Trimyristin.

-As a result, the percent Recovery of trimyristin from nutmeg was 20 percent.

-Melting Point was 52.3 degrees Celsius of the substance we isolated (trimyristin)

-When measuring the melting point of the trimyristin we took three temperatures and averaged them (51.3 degrees Celsius, 52.2 degrees Celsius, 53.4 degrees Celsius)

Discussion:

a.) Questions:

1. After recovering our sample of trimyristin, we tested to see what the melting point of our product would be. According to chem-info.com, the melting point for trimyristin is between 56 and 57 degrees Celsius. However, our product melted at a temperature of about 52.3 degrees Celsius, which is five degrees lower than the expected melting point of trimyristin. One of the reasons why our trimyristin melted at a lower temperature than expected may be to the fact that our extracted product was not in the purest form it could be in. The trimyristin we extracted from the nutmeg may have had some impurities which may have lowered the melting point temperature to 52.3 degrees Celsius.

2. Our experimentally determined melting point range for our trimyristin tells us that our purity of our product was relatively low. Since the substance did...