Hello everyone,
I think this could be a pretty long post, just so you know.
I'm a Master's student Bio-Engineering, and for my thesis I have to synthesize '15-crown-5 ' crown ether. I have been trying to do this in the laboratory for the past 4 months, without any decent yields. I am following an older protocol of Smid et al. 'Substituent Effects on the stability of cation complexes of 4'-substituted monobenzo crown ethers'. It is the image without the yellow text.
I added the protocol here.
It's been quite a disaster really. After numerous tries I've only managed to synthesize about 2 grams... As my background is more environmental sciences and not organic chemistry, I really could use some help also using this forum. The setup is a normal reflux setup in the beginning, and I use a rotavapor to evaporate the solvent. Then there is an extraction step (discussed below).
Is there something I'm missing in the protocol? Especially the extraction step (they talk about continuous extraction?) is a problem I think, I tried with a Soxhlet extraction but the oil seeped in the tubes. Also we just added the hot heptane to a beaker with the oil for extraction, is our extraction the biggest problem? (According to another paper by Sousa et al., image shared here as well).
I would need 10 + grams of this compound, so how it's going now it's not happening.
I am praying for help from people with experience in this, or people that could add anything to the protocol...
Thanks so much.
Christophe
