Lab Guides

Aldehydes and Ketones

This week’s lab is three experiments dealing with aldehydes and ketones. “Experiment” 22D is really just an exercise about the IR and NMR spectra of...

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Column Chromatography / Isolation of Caffeine from Tea

After an organic reaction it’s common to get a mixture of products. Usually one of them is what you want, and the other products are, well, garbage. Column chromatography is the method most commonly used to purify your product and remove undesired side products.

Contents:

Dehydration of Alcohols

This week you will be preparing an alkene by dehydrating an alcohol. This reaction proceeds via the same mechanism as in Carey CH 5.9, which I will review in...

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Extraction and Determination of a Distribution Coefficient (Kd)

The purpose of this lab is to calculate the Kd of benzoic acid in dichloromethane. Don’t even worry about what that means yet. First let’s talk about what extraction is and how to use a sep funnel. At the end of this guide I'll show you the sample calculations involving the distribution coefficient...

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Gas Chromatography (GC)

Gas chromatography (GC) is mainly used for the qualitative analysis of samples: it answers the question “What chemicals are present in this sample, and in what relative proportions?” The basic idea with GC is that you inject a liquid into a long coil (or column) which is contained in an oven....

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Infrared Absorbance Spectroscopy (IR)

Infrared absorbance spectroscopy (IR) is a structure elucidation technique: it tells you some information about the chemical structure of a molecule. Specifically, it tells you what functional groups are present or absent in a molecule.

IR measures the energy associated with different...

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Melting Point

There's only one major concept you need to know for melting points:
Impure samples have lower melting points than pure samples.

And that's just about all you need to know...

Contents:

  • How to Take a Melting Point
  • Key Melting Point Concepts
  • Questions You Will Probably Be...

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Molecular Models and Stereochemistry

This week you’ll be playing with your molecular modeling kits and working on a 12-page packet. The topics covered in your packet are discussed in chapters 3 and 7 of Carey (7th ed.), and you will learn them again in lecture sometime before the mid-term. Here are my comments on some of the harder (or more confusing) parts of the packet.

Nucleophilic Substitution of Alkyl Halides

This week you will be doing examining real life SN1 and SN2 reactions to see first hand the effects solvent, sterics (1°, 2°, or 3° substitution) and temperature have on reaction rates. The...

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Preparation/Recrystallization of Acetanilide

Contents:

  • How Recrystallization works – The basic idea
  • How Recrystallization works – The details
  • Key Recrystallization concepts
  • Plain English Procedure
  • Questions you will probably be asked

How...

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Properties of Alcohols

This week you will be exploring the properties of alcohols. It’s a pretty quick and straight-forward lab. I will start by mentioning...

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Properties of Hydrocarbons

This week you will be doing experiments on several different hydrocarbons- compounds composed of carbon and hydrogen atoms. The three known compounds you will be working with are cyclohexane, cyclohexane, and toluene (methyl benzene). These...

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Simple and Fractional Distillation

Distillation is a method of purifying liquids through differences in boiling points. For example, if the boiling point of liquid A is 65 ºC and the boiling point of liquid B is 111 ºC, than heating a mixture of A and B at 70 ºC (above the boiling point of A but below that of B) should boil off most of liquid A, allowing...

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The Diels-Alder Reaction

This week you’ll be creating a product via the Diels-Alder reaction. The Diels-Alder is unlike other organic reactions in that it doesn’t involve any nucleophiles...

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Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC)

Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC) is the most analytical technique for an organic chemist. It allows you to "see" what's going on inside a reaction by answering questions like: -Are products forming? -Are reactants being consumed? -Are any side reactions taking place?

Contents:

Williamson Ether Synthesis

This week you’re going to do a William ether synthesis, which is covered in chapter 16 of Carey (section 16.6 of the 7th edition). Your instructor will give you a handout with pretty detailed instructions....

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