No Luck With Ferrocene

In the first part of the Ferrocene experiment that we did on 9-8-11, our goal was simply to make ferrocene. The fun part of this lab was all the new tricks of the trade we got to learn, such as making an inert atmosphere in the reaction flask by flushing it with argon gas. The entire setup for the experiment was pretty extensive:

And this was just the first part of the reaction! The vaccuum and inert gas technique was neat, and the practice will be really helpful for our final project because it has to be done under an inert atmosphere too. We made a light brown liquid called potassium cyclopentadienide in this flask.

In a Schlenk flask (the flask on the left), we dissolved some iron (II) chloride tetrahydrate in DMSO, and then added that slowly to the other mixture using a cannula (new technique for us!). A cannula is basically a long two-sided needle that uses pressure differences to transfer liquid from one flask to another without using a syringe.

This stirred together into a dark red solution until we added ice and HCl, and then it turned bright lime green!

At this point, there was supposed to be orange solid forming in the green liquid, but we didn't see any. We added more ice and more HCl and some solid finally formed, but our yield was terrible. We vaccuum-filtered it anyway, and this is what we ended up with:

NOT a good result to the lab! This means that we will have to do this part of the lab over again, so hopefully we get a better yield next time.