Analgesic Drugs Lab Report

Introduction
The isolation of an active ingredient in analgesic drugs is an important technique to determine a drug’s composition. This technique can be exercised through column chromatography, a method used to purify a specific compound in a mixture. In column chromatography, alumina is typically used to separate less polar compounds by acting as a purifying agent. Most analgesic drugs work as pain relievers and generally fall into four categories. However, these drugs are made up of many more chemicals then just the pain relieving chemicals. All tablets must contain at least one active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) that will make up its pharmacological properties such as, acetylsalicylic acid, acetaminophen, ibuprofen or naproxen. These

A possible reason that such a low percent recovery was obtained was most likely due to evaporating too much of the solvent out when it was lodged into the warm water bath. However, the most likely reason that a low percent recovery was obtained is because the unknown was purified of everything except the API. Meaning that, the API only made up approximately 10.4% of the pill. Table 2 represents the melting point of unknown B, which was found to be acetyl salicylic acid. According to Chemicalbook, the melting point of acetyl salicylic acid is 134-136°C. However, the melting point of unknown B (acetyl salicylic acid) melted faster than the literate melting point of acetyl salicylic acid. The most likely explanation for this is that the crystals did not have an adequate drying time on the Buncher funnel, and that they were still somewhat wet when placed into the DigiMelt, a melting apparatus. This is because when the unknown B was placed into the DigiMelt, it was not fully solid, it contained liquid. Therefore, the unknown did not require as much heat to melt as it normally would because the unknown was already partly liquid. However, the unknown B had a narrow melting range, indicating that the substance was relatively pure and did not contain many contaminants. Potential contaminants that could be present in the crystallized unknown B could be, methanol, colorants, coating, buffering