Extraction of acetylsalicylic acid from Aspirin tablets

Nile Red has a very well made video on the extraction of acetylsalicylic acid from aspirin tablets. In it, he begins by breaking apart the tablets and mixing mixing them with acetone, then filters the mixture and rotovapping the acetylsalicylic acid from it. I don't have access to a rotovap, and I found that there are ingredients such as propylene glycol and polyethylene glycol. These compounds are soluble in acetone and subsequently would contaminate the product if they were just left in the solution. My solution is to saturate the acetone with the acetylsalicylic acid, then crash it out by dropping the solution into water. The propylene glycol and PEG are miscible with water so they should come out with washing of the acetylsalicylic acid crystals.



After crushing the tablets and mixing them with acetone I crashed the acetylsalicylic acid from the solution by mixing with equal parts water.
After letting the solution stand the product crystallized out and I was ready to vacuum filter.


 acetylsalicylic acid in buchner funnel after filtering and washing with water. 


After drying in the filter I transferred it to an evaporating dish to allow it to dry further. 

Cleaned product in evaporating dish
There is a theoretical yield of 162.5 grams of acetylsalicylic acid. I will repeat this extraction many more times. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using Airplane Transponder Data to Characterize Antenna Performance

Image
Hi All, Recently I obtained some low-noise amplifiers in order to better receive NOAA GOES satellites. A low-noise amplifier however is no good without a decent antenna. Most often people use these 2.4 GHz wifi antennas modified to operate at the GOES downlink frequency. This typically gives very good results but it's pretty challenging to DIY a satellite dish. An alternative to satellite dish type antennas is the highly directional yagi-uda antenna. Yagi-uda antennas are pretty (seemingly) simple to build so one night I made a first pass at throwing one together. Alas the satellite signal still did not appear (probably due to my poor assembly). Instead of scrapping the inadequate antenna I decided to try and figure out if adding the passive elements actually did anything to the directionality of the yagi-uda antenna versus a regular dipole antenna. To do this without some sort of signal source is typically impossible and so people resort to modelling programs that calculate the ga...
Read more

Microstate table for a d3 electronic configuration.

This was just a test to see if I could put LaTeX formatted tables into this webpage MathJax example $$\begin{array}{|c | c | c | c | c|} \hline \begin{array}{c}\end{array} & \frac{3}{2} & \frac{1}{2} & -\frac{1}{2} & -\frac{3}{2} \\ \hline 5 & \begin{array}{c}\end{array} & ^{2}H\begin{array}{c}^{2}H(2^+,2^-,1^+)\end{array} & \begin{array}{c}(1^-,2^-,2^+)\end{array} & \begin{array}{c}\end{array} \\ \hline 4 & \begin{array}{c}\end{array} & ^{2}G\begin{array}{c}^{2}H(2^+,2^-,0^+)\\^{2}G(2^+,1^+,1^-)\end{array} & \begin{array}{c}(0^-,2^-,2^+)\\(1^-,2^-,1^+)\end{array} & \begin{array}{c}\end{array} \\ \hline 3 & ^{4}F\begin{array}{c}^{4}F(2^+,1^+,0^+)\end{array} & ^{2}F\begin{array}{c}^{2}H(2^+,2^-,-1^+)\\^{2}G(2^+,1^+,0^-)\\^{4}F(2^+,1^-,0^+)\\^{2}F(2^-,1^+,0^+)\end{array} & \begin{array}{c}(1^-,2^-,0^+)\\(0^-,2^-,1^+)\\(0^-,1^-,2^+)\\(-1^-,2^-,2^+)\end{array} & \begin{array}{c}(0^-...
Read more

Perturbation Theory in Mathematica

Hello, I've wanted to implement perturbation theory in mathematica for some time now. Here, I've done so for a non-degenerate time independent case. Specifically for the one dimensional harmonic oscillator (not quantum because symbolic constants just make the computation take longer). I tested it on some problems from Shankar's quantum mechanics book and it works. The things you'll need are: 1. Eigenvalues and eigenfunctions for a solved case (in our case the harmonic oscillator). $$H0=\frac{\text{$\#$1} x^2}{2}-\frac{\nabla _{\{x\}}^{}\text{$\#$1}}{2}\&$$ \[ScriptCapitalH]0 = -(1/2) Laplacian[#1,{x}] + 1/2 (x^2) #1 &; \[ScriptCapitalH]1 = x^2 #1 &; \[ScriptCapitalH] = \[ScriptCapitalH]0[#1] + \[ScriptCapitalH]1[#1] &; {eigList, wfnList} = DEigensystem[\[ScriptCapitalH]0[u[x]],u[x],{x}\[Element] FullRegion[1], nmax, Method -> "Normalize"]; where nmax is the maximum number of eigenvalues/eigenfunctions to compute. ...
Read more