Course Details
The course is non residential and begins promptly at 10.00 am each day and finishes at 4.00 pm. The course comprises four practical sessions and one report writing session. Students will be split into four groups. Each group will perform one of the four practical sessions: organic, inorganic, physical and analytical in daily rotation from Tuesday to Friday. You will then have the weekend and four hours on the Monday to prepare your laboratory reports.
Working in a large university laboratory environment can initially be quite daunting and consequently the course is designed around the hopefully familiar chemistry of aspirin.
Organic Practical: Synthesis, Purification and Characterisation of Aspirin
Asprin is synthesised from salicylic acid and acetic anhydride using concentrated sulfuric acid as catalyst.
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The aspirin is recrystallised and characterised. Students learn the trade-off between purity and percentage yield and get to run their own NMR spectra.
Inorganic Practical: Synthesis of Copper II Aspirinate and Salicylate
UV / Vis Spectroscopy is used to verify synthesis of a pair of coordination complexes.
Simple precipitation reactions are used to prepare copper II aspirinate and salicylate.
Physical Practical: The Kinetic Hydrolysis of Acetyl Salicylic Acid (ASA)
UV / Vis Spectroscopy is used to monitor formation of a salicycilic acid complex.
Observation of the effect of initial ASA concentration on the pseudo-first-order reaction of the hydrolysis of ASA.
Analytical Practical: Measuring the Percentage Composition of an Aspirin Tablet
ASA content is analysed by dissolution, filtration, followed by evaporation and weighing or titration.
“In most medicines today, the active ingredient is only a part of the capsule or dosage. Pharmaceutical companies add fillers to counter the side-effects of the drug…”
The experiments are designed to cover many of the important disciplines within chemistry. We shall hopefully teach you a range of techniques that will help you feel more comfortable when you arrive at your chosen university in September. These include safety, synthesis, recrystallisation, thin layer chromatography, mp analysis, UV / vis spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and kinetic analysis.