In: Chemistry
How would the following experimental errors affect your experimental results while separating the components of a counterfeit pharmaceutical (yield, purity or both) and explain why. A) you failed to dry the product completely. B)you used enough water to recrystallise phenacetin, however your Unknown was acetanilide. C)in experiment 1, you didn't extract all of the aspirin from DCM solution.
A) If you fail to dry the product completely the yiled and purity that you measure will be higher than the actual yield and purity as the water in the sample will add to the actual sample and thus give higher yield and hence higher purity.
B) when you are trying to crystallise a sample you want the solubility to be low so that you heat the solvent such that the material starts to dissolve and on colling it crystallises otu and the impuritites remain dissolved. If the solubility of a compound is high it does not crystallise you well and nthe process needs to be repeated multiple times by reducing the solvent between each attempt.
Here we are compaing phenacetin and acetanilide as per the solubility data acetanilide is more soluble then phenacetin so if you had water to crystallise phenacetin then acetanilide will remain dissolved and not precipitae out.
c) If all extraction from the the a) experiment was not completed then the yield and purity of the other compound will be shown to be higher.