Practical 4B: Chitin in KOH 2

 Practical 4B

Week 5

Teammates Present: Nelly, Jovan

Written By Jovan

After week 4, job scopes are established, and literature review was done. Once sufficient literature review had been done, the scope for chitin dissolution had changed to become more streamlined and focused on alkaline solvents. However, there were several gaps made in the work procedure that resulted in a botched experiment. Key steps were missing like drying of the undissolved residue to compare initial and final weight. There were also several inaccuracies in the experimental run.

Figure 1: Chitin dissolution HHH level runs (left), attempted drying of wet undissolved residue (right)

 

Figure 2: Final undissolved chitin mass recorded from both runs (initial mass: 1g)

 The results from the 2 runs were slightly different. Both runs were done at 180°C, 5M and 200 rpm to experiment with dissolving chitin in concentrated KOH. The first run resulted in the chitin not dissolving in the KOH well. However for the second run, the chitin dissolve slightly better as seen from the clearness of the solution. More runs have to be done to obtain more reliable data.

Follow-Up

Create a Chitin recipe to dissolve chitin flakes in a suitable alkaline solvent at a suitable concentration (Note: time taken to dissolve, if any, should also be monitored)

Revisions to be made to the work procedure regarding the study of effects of temperature, concentration, and agitation on the Alkaline-Chitin mixture