Laboratory Report 2: Extraction

University of Mindanao

Matina Campus

Colline Faye M. Canillas

BIO122/L (6604)

Prof. Hazel G. Carreon, PhD.

March 7,2023
 Introduction

The first step in separating the desired natural products from the raw materials is extraction. According
to the extraction principle, there are several different extraction methods, including solvent extraction,
distillation, pressing, and sublimation (Zhang,Q.W., Lin, L.G., Ye, W.C., 2018). Extraction is used in chemical
labs for a variety of reasons. It is a key technique for extracting chemicals from plant-based materials.
Compounds are transferred from one liquid to another during extraction in order to facilitate manipulation or
concentration. Also, it makes it possible to take out specific mixture components (Nichols, L., 2020). In the
extraction process, a solvent is utilized to separate an important chemical from a liquid substance (Fenner,
Y.,2018). In this experiment, the solvent used to extract the organic compound (namely caffeine) from the tea is
the chemical compound toluene (C₆H₅CH₃). Several chemicals, especially other organic compounds, readily
dissolve in toluene, making it a great solvent. This makes it a frequent compound in organic chemistry labs.
There are two different kinds of extraction: solvent extraction, often known as liquid-liquid extraction, and
solid-liquid extraction. The separation of chemicals based on their relative solubilities in two separate
immiscible liquids or solid matter compounds underlies both methods of extraction. Liquid-liquid extraction is
an operation in which the components of the liquid mixture are separated by contacting it with a suitably
insoluble liquid solvent that preferentially dissolves one or more components. Solid-Liquid Extraction is the
process of removing specific elements from a mixture of solids by coming into contact with a liquid solvent that
dissolves those constituents. Both of this process were utilized in this extraction experiment.

The purpose of this experiment is to separate the targeted organic ingredient, in this case, caffeine, from
the tea bags and to determine how much caffeine was recovered. To ensure no mistakes are made, it is
important to comprehend and adhere to the correct guidelines for removing caffeine from tea bags. This study
aims to answer the following objectives:

1. Compare single and multiple extractions of caffeine from dried tea leaves.
2. Calculate the percentage yield of caffeine for both extraction procedure.

Null Hypothesis:

There would be no percent yield of caffeine for both extraction procedure.

 Result and Discussion

In this experiment, single extraction and multiple extractions were both used as extraction techniques.
Multiple extractions simply refer to doing an extraction process more than once while utilizing fewer volumes
of solvent for each extraction. Meanwhile, single extraction generally means extracting once using a
considerably higher volume of solvent compared to multiple extractions. According to Chormey, D.S., and
Bakirdere,S, (2018), it has been mathematically demonstrated that using few volumes of organic solvents in
multiple extraction is more effective than using high volume of solvent in single extraction.

Figure 1a. Single Extraction Figure 1b. Multiple Extraction

Although the other three groups (including my group) employed single extraction, the other two groups
carried out multiple extractions. The figures seen above come from two distinct groups that employed various
extraction techniques. For Fig. 1a, Single Extraction was used, whereas Fig. 1b used Multiple Extraction to
compare which of the two was significantly more effective. The experiment was going well until a major error
wiped out all the data that had been acquired. After effectively separating the layer required to extract the
caffeine, sodium sulfate was applied to this layer to eliminate unnecessary substances like tannins and other
materials so that we could only extract pure caffeine. Once the sodium sulfate absorbs these particular
compounds (tannins, other compounds found in green tea), we discard the aqueous solution left without
knowing that the liquid is supposed to be used and to be heated to get the caffeine that is needed.

As a result, the incorrect product was collected, and since the product wasn't even caffeine, the estimates
for the percentage yield of caffeine were incorrect. This outcome thus validates my hypothesis because the
experiment's flaw resulted in incorrect computations.
 Conclusion

It's very frustrating that this single extraction experiment didn't work out. As no caffeine was found in
the collected product, the experiment was a failure. We acknowledge that we failed to carry out this experiment
correctly due to a lack of understanding of what should be done correctly. If we had been given more time and
all the necessary materials, we could have repeated the experiment and conducted it correctly. The outcome of
our experiment was significantly impacted by this error. If ever we do this experiment again, we would use
multiple extractions since it is way more effective than single extraction.

Experimental section

This part would cover the step-by-step procedures done to make this experiment happen. First is to boil
500ml of water in a pot and on a beaker pour 100ml distilled water and pour 4.4g of anhydrous sodium
carbonate and dissolve it before putting the beaker inside the pot. While waiting, weigh 10g of tea bag/ tea
leaves and put it inside the beaker, but make sure all of the tea bags are fully submerged in the solution. Wait
for 10 mins. before turning off the heat. Remove the beaker from the pot and squeeze the remaining juices out
of the tea bag before removing it, and now you can let the extract cool down to room temperature. Prepare a
separation funnel for the next step. Once the extract already cools down, you can now pour your extract inside
the funnel and since this experiment used single extraction, 60ml of toluene would be then poured inside the
funnel. Wait for 2 minutes or after there is a clear separation between the layer. Now extract the organic layer
from the solvent/ aqueous solution and put the remaining aqueous solution in an Erlenmeyer flask. Pour half a
spatula of the sodium sulfate inside the Erlenmeyer flask to absorb the remaining unnecessary compounds that
were extracted along with the solution. After this, we discarded the aqueous solution and pour the remaining
solid materials which are sodium sulfate into an evaporating dish (which is why our experiment is wrong). We
then left the evaporated dish for 8 hrs. to fully evaporated and we were already done. But since our experiment
was wrong, there is an additional procedure to extract the pure and real caffeine.
 References

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