Purifying our Wild Card Project

On Tuesday 11-15-11 we purified Part A of our recently redone Wild Card Project. Where the last time, we just poured the 5 20-ml portions of methylene chloride over the green solid while filtering the whole time, this time we decided to stir the green solid into the methylene chloride and then vacuum filter the solution to get the undissolved impure solid back out. We then replaced the filter paper with a new one and put the left-over green solid into another portion of methylene chloride. We vacuumed it and repeated this process for three more portions of methylene chloride. We knew we were dissolving the green solid in the solvent because after we were done extracting it, we had very little of the green solid left so most of it must have gone into the solution which was now yellow. We then added a boiling chip to the solution and heated it until most of the solvent evaporated.

Once this was done, we stuck it in an ice bath and hoped that we would see some crystals forming. The last time, this didn't really happen so we were hoping that we would get lucky this time! There was some solid in the beaker and we let the rest of the methylene chloride evaporate off so that the crystals would form. We finally did get a slightly shimmery yellow-orange powder that we figured was our pure product, and we got a lot of it, so we don't have to worry about not having enough to run tests this time. Here is the pure product:

The melting point of the pure product was 198 degrees Celsius. The melting point of Part B of the Wild Card was slightly lower at 140 degrees Celsius.