Diels Alder Reaction

Discussion:
1. The Diels alder reaction has to be heated slowly to 60-70 degrees Celsius because if it is heated too quickly and the temperature gets too high the 2,3-dimethyl-1,3-butadiene will boil. A round bottom flask was attached to a water condenser to prevent any product from boiling and evaporating out during the heating process. For the hydrolysis part of the experiment the temperature needed to be 60-80 degrees Celsius to melt the cyclic anhydride but also prevent the reaction from boiling and losing product from evaporation. Lastly the final product crystals were not washed with hot water because it would have melted the crystal thus cold water was used. The Hydrolysis reaction included an acidic environment and an acidic catalyst to make the reaction occur faster and initiate the reaction as well. The acidic environment is required in order to add the hydrogen and oxygen onto the carbonyl groups in the final product. Dicarboxylic acid is not very soluble in water/acetone which ultimately resulted in larger yield of product.
2. In order to isolate intermediate product a work up procedure is required which was pouring the reaction into water. This produces the intermediate product 4,5 dimethylcyclohexane 1-2 dicarboxylic acid

The IR Spec for the intermediate product was good and had the two major peaks one around 2800 cm^-1 indicating the cyclohexane and the C-H bonds and the other peak was around 1790 cm^-1 indicating the C=O bonds present. This showed that my intermediate product was fairly pure. My IR spec for the final product was not very good and although it included the peak around 2900 cm^-1 for the ring and the C-H bond it did not include the peak around 2500 cm^-1 for the RCO-OH bonds in the carboxylic acid groups. Also there was no peak around 1730 cm ^-1 which would indicate the C=O groups present in the final product. This showed that my final product was not very pure and that there was a lot of contamination in the second part of the