[Lioness]

Hi everyone. I was unsure of whether to put this in here or the organic chem forum, but seeing as it's a high school experiment, I'll put it here.

Basically, we did an ester preparation practical. We refluxed glacial ethanoic acid and 1-butanol to make an ester, purified it, and then distilled it into the separate compounds.

Problem being, we didn't get to finish the distillation, and I'm unsure of what would have happened. The main problem being that ethanoic acid and 1-butanol have almost exactly the same boiling point. (118.1C and 117.2C)

I need to record observations, and I'm not sure what would've been observed. Any help would be really appreciated.

[Lioness]

Never mind. A classmate informed me that the intention was to separate the ester from the other components.