Question

Hi, so I did a isolation of caffeine in tea lab.

Purpose: The purpose of this lab was to isolate caffeine that is found in tea by using the technique of extracting, separating, and sublimation.

One of my lab questions is- What were the limitations to meting your purpose? How could those limitations be minimized? There are 2 big limitations.

Answer 1

Limitataions:

1) The mass of the tea leaves used contains stem and it varies for every sample. The presence of stem will greatly effect the amount of caffiene extracted.

2) The size of the tea leaves also vary from each sample, this effects the total surface area exposed. Large surface area will increase the rate of diffusion of caffiene

Improvements:

1) The tea leaves that will be used have to be sorted out to prevent the presence of unwanted stems.

2) Make sure the tea leaves are in the same size through out the sample. if the leaves are big, split it in to equal parts to maintain the uniformity.