Ethanol From Sucrose Lab Report

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Purpose:
The purpose of this procedure was to use the carbohydrate sucrose in a fermentation reaction in order to produce ethanol.

Procedure:
Refer to handout, “Lab 12: Ethanol from Sucrose”

Discussion:
Based on the data obtained, Table 1 demonstrates that when obtaining the percent recovery of ethanol, 25% ethanol was obtained. This represents a relatively good percent recovery because ideally about 30.1% ethanol should have been produced. According to Chemspider, the density of ethanol is 0.8 g/〖 cm〗^3 and the density of water is 1.00 g/〖 cm〗^3. Therefore, all of the densities present in Table 1 may be incorrect due to a variety of reasons, such as incorrectly recording the mass or volume of the product. The volume could have been perceived as a different number because perception varies from person to person. However, the data results make sense because none of the densities reported were below 0.8g/〖 cm〗^3 or higher than 1.00 g/〖 cm〗^3, therefore, the data results were relatively accurate, but probably contained impurities.

In a practical application, fractional distillation could be used in environmental chemistry in order to …show more content…

In order to make sure that no sediment was transferred into the clear supernatant, brieflycentrifuge the supernatant. Another way to improve this procedure would be to collect 0.50 mL of supernatant using a 0.50 mL pipette; this would limit the amount of inaccurate readings of the volume. Ultimately, causing the densities to be more accurate. Additionally, to improve this procedure, two weeks could be allowed for the fermentation reaction to sit instead of one week. This is because one week is the minimum amount of time required to let a fermentation reaction sit. Therefore, the longer the reaction sits, the more likely it will be to obtain a high percent yield of

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