Purification Of Paracetamol Essay

There were a few practical problems when going through the steps in the extraction and purification of paracetamol from tablets. A problem that could be faced with this is accuracy. This would be an issue if the scales were not fully set to zero. This could be overcome by calibrating the spirit level. Also it takes time for it to fully reach its weight on the reading so you may move them too quick before the right weight has been set. Too add to this the propanone may not be filled to the meniscus to the 20 cm³ so this will need to be precise by looking at it from eye level. The tablets may have not been fully broken up sufficiently enough and some of the pieces may have fallen through the filter paper so this will have to be tightly done. This means another issue was filtration. The filter paper …show more content…
Moreover another problem we were faced with during the experiment was when the propanone was being heated up, it sometimes bubbled over the sides of the tube. When leaving the propanone to evaporate overnight, we may have got contamination on our yield and lost some mass. We only had 10cm3 of water to dissolve the solid in which was a very small amount meaning some of the solid may not have dissolved. However if too much water was added, it would have affected the formation of my crystals. Another problem we faced was that you had to make sure we left the solid on the scales for a long enough time to allow the scales to configure the most precise weight for it. Too add to this we had to make sure the solid was secure at the bottom of the capillary tube so it didn’t just fall out once you tip it upside down inside the Thiele tube. In addition a problem with heating the Thiele tube was that we couldn’t tell the precise reading of the temperature as the thermometer was constantly going up at a fast rate which meant it may have not been totally correct. The last problem I had was drying out the paracetamol. Some of the water was left behind so I couldn’t get it