Eugenol Oil

Introduction

In this experiment, steam distillation was used to isolate eugenol oil from cloves. The goal of this experiment was to test and analyze the purity level of the eugenol oil that was isolated by applying a TLC test as well as H-NMR spectra. At the end of this experiment, eugenol oil was isolated, but some errors that occurred during the experiment resulted in impurities in the final isolated oil.

Theory

The major component of cloves is the Eugenol oil, which is insoluble in water. In the procedures of this experiment, water was added to the dry cloves and the resulting liquid was heated until it boiled. When the liquid boiled, the vapor pressure of that liquid was at equilibrium with the pressure of the outside. Therefore, vapor

The total pressure of these two layers is the addition of the vapor pressure of each layer. Mixing these two layers results in a higher vapor pressure, which thus results in a lower boiling point than the boiling points of the water and the oil individually. Eugenol oil is the organic layer; therefore it is hydrophobic (afraid of water) and is nonpolar. This causes a boiling temperature that is slightly lower than 100 °C for the eugenol oil. Because eugenol oil has a lower boiling point than water, the molecule of eugenol is more likely to be able to escape into the air than the water, which has a higher boiling point. Therefore, the amount of water, which is the inorganic layer, will be higher than the eygenol oil in the distillate that was

Because of the limited amount of time the student is provided during this lab experiment, the complete amount of distillate was not collected fully due to the procedure being very slow and time consuming. The final eugenol that was isolated was not completely pure, and this is proven by the percent recovery being 110%, which is clearly higher than a 100%. This means that other substances were isolated along with the eugenol oil, such as leftover dichloromethane, which was used in the first place because the water and eugenol did not successfully separate into two layers, thus dichloromethane was added to help separate them. This is was caused percent recovery to be higher than what it should be. Heating and boiling the final solution for a longer time until all the dichloromethane is evaporated completely can easily avoid the presence of