EB

3234

Organic Chemistry

Name: CHAI YU KUN, CHONG XING JIET

ID: 00016306, 00016305

Experiment Title: Caffeine Extraction from Tea

Instructor: Ms. Siti Fatimah MY

Email Address: maplekun29@gmail.com

kellykel98@gmail.com

Date of Experiment: 26/7/2018

Result

Table 1: Weight of caffeine

Tea brand Lipton

Mass of tea leaves, g 8.00
Mass of empty beaker, g 109.385
Mass of beaker + caffeine, g 109.545
Mass of caffeine, g 0.16
Average mass of caffeines
1 tea bag (2.00g) contained 55mg caffeine, four packets of tea leaves was used.

Question:
1.
 There were several possible sources of error in this experiment that were believed to
have had an impact on the crude caffeine yields following extraction. Firstly, when the
tea was filtered after cooking by using a cloth filter bag, a little amount of caffeine might
be left in the bag. One of the errors detected was the extraction process. During the
extraction, the caffeine might not be fully extracted from the tea. There might be a little
amount of the caffeine left in the tea residue. Next, a loss of caffeine could have occurred
due to emulsions and due to not thoroughly reacting with dichloromethane to extract as
much caffeine as possible. Then, since there was a lot of transfer of the caffeine from one
container to another container throughout the procedure, which presented many
opportunities to loose product. It was also possible that the concentration of caffeine was
not height enough because too much water was added when cooking. Another source of
error could be the theoretical amount of caffeine in the tea bags, if it was originally more
or less due to random error, the percent recovery would be calculated differently. Another
major error was the leakage happened during extraction of caffeine. This was due to the
fact that the funnel used was old and spoiled so leakage happened.
　 To remedy these errors, several steps could have been taken. In order to reduce
sources of error in the future, two trials could be done. It was also possible to use a
different source of caffeine, and to ensure all techniques were performed properly. A
proper filtering technique should be applied so that the extract needed was completely
filtered. Also, a proper extracting method should be applied to get the maximum amount
of extract needed. Last but not least, the equipment and apparatus used must be well-
maintained or replaced in order to prevent leakage.