Steam Distillation Lab Report

This lab used techniques in steam distillation to extract crude oil from cloves. The cloves were boiled in a round bottom flask and using a hydrodistillation apparatus, the crude oil was separated from the cloves and sent into a clean flask. This step was used to separate the essential oils from the cloves (Setzer, W., 2008).
The distillate was poured into a separatory funnel and extracted three times with dichloromethane to extract the water. After being extracted three times, a fifth of the solution was set aside to be later used in the thin-layer chromatography plate (Setzer, W., 2008).
The remaining four-fifths were put back into the separatory funnel to be extracted three times with 5% NaOH in order to deprotonate the solution, which converts it into a salt. Since eugenol is slightly acidic, it can be deprotonated with NaOH. The other components are not acidic and will remain soluble in dichloromethane since they will not deprotonate. The aqueous layers were washed once more with dichloromethane to make the solution consist mostly of eugenol acetate. HCl was added to the solution in order to make the …show more content…
The plate was placed into a mixture of dichloromethane and hexane and allowed to elute. Through capillary action, each solution and the solvent travelled up the TLC plate (Setzer, W., 2008). The solvent travels past each spot on the plate and while the polar silica gel tries to hold the spot in place, the solvent tries to move the spot with it as it travels up the plate. After removed from the solvent, the plate was placed into an iodine chamber in order to be able to visualize the distances the solutions travelled. The crude oil had two spots develop since it contained both Eugenol and eugenol acetate. Eugenol acetate travelled farther up the plate since it is less polar than eugenol (Tabata, R,