The past year has helped me develop skills that may be indispensable to me as an engineering student. I explored the changes in the rate of esterification with primary, secondary and tertiary alcohols to examine the limitations of forming new esters. To this end, I performed extensive research and spent hours in the lab, even after school and on weekends, collecting results, repeating trials and pouring over what I found.

Attached is the abstract of the research essay.

Abstract

Esters are an important class of compounds because they are used extensively

in chemical industries for the production of a variety of goods such as

perfumes, lubricants, food flavorings and cosmetics. The rate at which esters

are formed is dependent significantly on the structure of the reactants and

this relationship may of interest to producers who use esters in their products.

Thus, I chose to investigate the following research question:

“How does the type of alcohol (primary, secondary and tertiary) used in

the Fischer Speier‐ esterification reaction affect the rate of the reaction,

as determined through back titration?”‐

The alcohols used are methanol (primary), ethanol (primary), propan 2 ol‐ ‐

(secondary) and 2 methyl‐ propan 2 ol‐ ‐ (tertiary). The method involved two

steps - the preparation of ester and using back titration‐ to calculate the rate.

10 ml of 10.0M ethanoic acid was reacted with 10 ml of 10.0M the alcohol in a

flask, under a reflux, for 30 mins at 60C to form the ester. Sulphuric acid

was used as a catalyst. The reaction mixture, with excess ethanoic acid was

back titrated with 2.0M NaOH to calculate the concentration of ethanoic acid

reacted and consequently the rate.

The results showed that rate of esterification was greatest with primary

alcohols and least with tertiary alcohols, as hypothesized. Methanol was found

to be most reactive and 2 methyl‐ propan 2 ol‐ ‐ was the least reactive with the

rate of esterification being 0.044 0.004 mol dm 3‐ min 1‐‐ for methanol and

0.007 0.007 mol dm 3‐ min 1‐‐ (almost zero) for 2 methyl‐ propan 2 ol. ‐ ‐ There

was a difference of 84.1% in the rates of these two alcohols, which is a

considerable variation. A few extensions were suggested to widen the scope

of the investigation by comparing different methods of making esters and to

explore further into the factors that bring about a difference in the rate of

reaction.

Word Count: 297 words