:: Tiring practical... ::

oh goodness... today my 8hrs prac is so pathetic... so many hectic procedures, to yield 0.0387g of product (only 30% yield)... well, i am 1 of the lucky ones in my group already... some of us cant even recover 0.02g of compound...

it is a blessing dat we started off part A of the experiment to synthesize metal-free porphyrin, dat took 2 hrs... today, we have wrapped up part B & C... part B required a series of heating steps... from reaction, product extraction, low intense removal of solvent and high intense removal of another solvent... haha... i think my solvent extraction process was quite well done and attracted alot of attention from my peers... keke... my aqueous phase (water) was totally clean and clear... while the others haf a dull yellow aqueous phase. somehow... it pressurized them to do more than the required 3 times for solvent extraction... in the end, they spend more time removing the solvent than me...

the worse thing is... only 1 machine is available for the high intense drying... many of us spent quite some time waiting... lucky for me, i was the 2nd to use the device... coz i got less solvent than the rest... keke... ops, think i sabo them in an indirect way...

the next step was column separation... we ran our product thru a column of silica gel with toluene:hexane mixture... as the collected sample is a composition of different compounds... they will each travel at different rate along the silica gel column. as the compound dat we are interested in is bright red in color... so we only collected the region dat is red in color... guess wat... everyone collected abt 1L of the bright red liquid and evapourate the solvent off to only 10mL... my goodness~! 1L to 10mL... so we all spent abt 1-2hrs on concentrating the bright red compound...

in the end, only such a small amount of product was being fabricated... so sad... & tiring... yawnz...

+ BL updated @ 12:02 AM

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