Unit 4 Assignment 3: Aspirin
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Shenay Isaac
Producing Aspirin
Aspirin
Aspirin is a salicylate anti innallatory drug that is used lostly in tablet forls that has a nulber
of uses, frol relieving pain to reducing the risk of serious problels such as heart atacks and
strokes. It has the ability to lake the blood less stcky and can stop blood clots so is given to
cardiovascular patents. This is due to its antplatelet ualites. owever, it is ofen used for short
terl relief to reduce the pain of systels such as headaches, toothaches and colds. A doctor lay
also recollend this if an individual had had a stroke or heart atack also. In additon, biologists use
aspirin to interfere with white blood cell acton, and lolecular biologists use the drug to actvate
genes.
Raw Materials
To produce aspirin tablets, corn starch and water are added to acetylsalicylic acid to serve as both a
binding agent and fller, along with a lubricant. Fillers (diluents give the tablets increased bulk to
produce tablets of ade uate size. A porton of the lubricant is added during lixing and the rest is
added afer the tablets are colpressed. Possible lubricants include: hydrogenated vegetable oil,
stearic acid, talc, or aluliniul stearate.
Chewable aspirin tablets contain diferent diluents, such as lannitol, lactose, sorbitol, sucrose, and
inositol, which allow the tablet to dissolve as a faster rate In additon, navour agents, such as
saccharin, and colouring agents are added to chewable tablets.
Manufacturing of aspirin
Aspirin tablets of the sale dosage alount are lanufactured in batches. Afer careful weighing, the
necessary ingredients are lixed and colpressed into units of granular lixture called slugs. The
slugs are then fltered to relove air and lulps, and are colpressed again (or punched into
nulerous individual tablets. (The nulber of tablets will depend on the size of the batch, the dosage
alount, and the type of tablet lachine used. Doculentaton on each batch is kept throughout the
lanufacturing process, and fnished tablets undergo several tests before they are botled and
packaged for distributon. The procedure for lanufacturing hard aspirin tablets, known as dryi
granulaton or slugging.
Purity
To test the purity of ly Aspirin, leltng point is used. A MELiTEMP lachine was used to test the
leltng point of ly salple. The crystals that I produced are added to a capillary tube and then
inserted in to the MELiTEMP lachine. This lachine allowed us deterline what our leltng point of
Aspirin was which allowed us to colpare it to published fgures. A pure salple should lelt at the
sale point every tle, when it contains ilpurites this can cause the leltng point to increase as
these ilpurites have diferent leltng points to the salple. Therefore, this leans it takes longer
for the crystals to lelt as lore energy is re uired to lelt the ilpurites also.
Testng for purity in industry is ilportant as the aspirin will be sold to the public on a large scale. If
afer going through only one purity test, the aspirin is sold to the public and it is ilpure. This could
cause a largeiscale issue of illness.
My salple
The leltng point of ly salple of aspirin leasured in ly practcal was 139 degrees. owever, the
leltng point of pure aspirin is 135 degrees. Due to ly leltng point being degrees higher than
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