Revisiting Elimination Reactions in the Pentanol and Bromopentane Series

Abstract

While elimination reactions are ubiquitous in organic chemistry textbooks, their implementation in undergraduate laboratories still suffers from a lack of reliable and easy setup procedures. This paper describes an easy-to-implement set of elimination experiments in the pentanol and bromopentane series using a modified Hickman distillation head. These experiments expose the students to elimination reactions under acidic and basic conditions while analyzing the reaction mixture to determine the stereochemistry of the final products. Additionally, the new safe and green design of these two experiments makes them attractive to implement in large enrollment organic chemistry teaching laboratories in addition to the experiments already available in such settings.