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 6+yrs of mystery!? solved.
The mystery of purple esters has been solved by our proud chemistry class taught by Ms Whitehead (5CH1) today on the 9/2/2011!!
The story behind this is that, ever since my teacher started teaching at St George Girls High School, certain groups have gotten purple products during our ester practicals (as a part of the acidic environment topic in chemistry). But this year, we have decided to control our experiments as real student chemists. We did this by setting certain groups with different variables which the teachers of the science staffroom have come up with.
These variables include:
- dirty boiling chips (everyone in our class was given brand new boiling chips except one group who were using the old boiling chips)
- the level of heat placed upon the reactants (certain groups had to put the bunsen burner to the side of the water bath away from the pear shaped flasks while others were placed directly under the pear shaped flask - with the water bath of course)
- the amount of sulfuric acid (conc) as a catalyst (some groups added a few drop while others followed the usual 1mL input)

In the end, everyone had clear esters except for one group!
And it was....
The group with the heat directly under the experiment!
Their ester had turned, deep red then purple!
And our teacher was very proud that her hypothesis was correct *giggles
but yeah.
In conclusion, too much heat placed upon the reactants would result in the burning of the alkanoic acids and alkanols and thus causes the products to turn purple!

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"6+yrs of mystery!? solved." was Posted On: Wednesday, February 9, 2011 @9:50 PM | 2 lovely comments

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