• You should draw attention to pieces of data that most strongly support your expected structure. This approach will demonstrate evaluative understanding of the data; that means you can look at data and decide what parts are more crucial than others.
• You should also draw attention to negative results: that is, peaks that might be there if this spectrum matched another, possible structure, but that are in fact missing.

One of the most complicated problems to deal with is the analysis of a mixture. This situation is not uncommon when students run reactions in lab and analyse the data.

• Sometimes the spectra show a little starting material mixed in with the product.
• Sometimes solvents show up in the spectrum.
• As you might expect, the minor component usually shows up as smaller peaks in the spectrum. If there are fewer molecules present, then there are usually fewer protons to absorb in the spectrum.
• In this case, you should probably make two completely separate sets of data tables for your analysis, one for each compound, or else one for the main compound and one for impurities.

Remember that integration ratios are really only meaningful within a single compound. If your NMR sample contains some benzene (C₆H₆) and some acetone (CH₃COCH₃), and there is a peak at 7.15 that integrates to 1 proton and a peak at 2.10 ppm integrating to 6 protons, it might mean there are 6 protons in acetone and 1 in benzene, but you can tell that isn’t true by looking at the structure. There must be six times as many acetone molecules as benzene molecules in the sample.

There are six protons in the benzene, and they should all show up near 7 ppm.  There are six protons in acetone, and they should all show up near 2 ppm.  Assuming that small integral of 1H for the benzene is really supposed to be 6H, then the large integral of 6H for the acetone must also represent six times as many hydrogens, too.  It would be 36 H.  There are only six hydrogens in acetone, so it must represent six times as many acetone molecules as there are benzenes.

Similarly, if you have decided that you can identify two sets of peaks in the ¹H spectrum, analysing them in different tables makes it easy to keep the integration analysis completely separate too ; 1 H in one table will not be the same size integral as 1 H in the other table unless the concentrations of the two compounds in the sample are the same.

However, comparing the ratio of two integrals for two different compounds can give you the ratio of the two compounds in solution, just as we could determine the ratio of benzene to acetone in the mixture described above.

We will look at two examples of sample mixtures that could arise in lab.  Results like these are pretty common events in the labIn the first example, a student tried to carry out the following reaction, a borohydride reduction of an aldehyde.  The borohydride should give a hydride anion to the C=O carbon; washing with water should then supply a proton to the oxygen, giving an alcohol.

Her reaction produced the following spectrum.

(simulated data)

From this data, she produced the table below.

Notice how she calculated that ratio.  She found a peak in molecule 1, the aldehyde, that she was pretty sure corresponded to the aldehydic hydrogen, the H attached to the C=O; in other words, the CH=O.  She found another peak from molecule 2, the alcohol, that she was pretty sure represented the two hydrogens on the carbon attached to oxygen, the CH₂-O.

The integrals for those two peaks are equal.  They are both 2H in her table.  However, she notes that within each molecule, the first integral really represents 1H and the second represents 2H.  That means there must be twice as many of molecule 1 as there are molecule 2.  That way, there would be 2 x CH=O, and its integral would be the same as the 1 x CH₂-O in the other molecule.

One way to approach this kind of problem is to:

•  choose one peak from each of the two compounds you want to compare.
• decide how many hydrogens each peak is supposed to represent in a molecule.  Is it supposed to be a CH₂, a CH, a CH₃?
• divide the integral value for that peak by that number of hydrogens it is supposed to represent in a molecule.
• compare the two answers  (integral A / ideal # H) vs (integral B / ideal # H).
• the ratio of those two answers is the ratio of the two molecules in the sample.

So there is twice as much aldehyde as alcohol in the mixture.  In terms of these two compounds alone, she has 33% alcohol and 66% aldehyde.  That’s ( 1/(1+2) ) x100% for the alcohol, and ( 2/(1+2) ) x100% for the aldehyde.  That calculation just represents the amount of individual component divided by the total of the components she wants to compare.

There are a number of things to take note of here.

• Her reaction really didn’t work very well.  She still has majority starting material, not product.
• She will get a good grade on this lab. Although the experiment didn’t work well, she has good data, and she has analyzed it very clearly.
• She has separated her data table into different sections for different compounds. Sometimes that makes it easier to analyze things.
• She has noted the actual integral data (she may have measured the integral with a ruler) and also converted it into a more convenient ratio, based on the integral for a peak that she felt certain about.
• She went one step further, and indicated the internal integration ratio within each individual compound.
• She calculated the % completion of the reaction using the integral data for the reactant and product, and she made clear what part of the data she used for that calculation.  A similar procedure could be done if a student were just trying to separate two components in a mixture rather than carry out a reaction.
• She also calculated the overall purity of the mixture, including a solvent impurity that she failed to remove.
• However, CHCl₃ is not included in her analysis of purity.  CHCl₃ really isn’t part of her sample; it was just present in the NMR solvent, so it doesn’t represent anything in the material she ended up with at the end of lab.

Another student carried out a similar reaction, shown below.  He also finished the reaction by washing with water, but because methanol is soluble in water, he had to extract his product out of the water.  He chose to use dichloromethane for that purpose.

He obtained the following data.

From this data, he constructed the following table.

There are some things to learn about this table, too.

• Does the integration ratio really match the integral data?  Or is this just wishful thinking?
• This table might reflect what he wants to see in the data.  But what else could be in the data?
• CHCl₃ is often seen in NMR spectra if CDCl₃ is used for the NMR sample. It’s there, at 7.2 ppm.
• “Leftover” or residual solvent is very common in real lab data.  There it is, CH₂Cl₂ from the extraction, at 5.4 ppm.
• What about water?  Sometimes people don’t dry their solutions properly before evaporating the solvent.  There is probably water around 1.5 to 1.6 ppm here.

This student might not get a very good grade; the sample does not even show up in the spectrum, so he lost it somewhere.  But his analysis is also poor, so he will really get a terrible grade.

Spectrum 10:

Spectrum 11:

Spectrum 12:

P5.8:  Match the ¹H-NMR spectra 13-18 below to their corresponding structures M-R .

Structures:

Spectrum 13:

Spectrum 14: 1-723C (structure O)

Spectrum 15:

Spectrum 16:

Spectrum 17:

Spectrum 18:

P5.9:  Match the ¹H-NMR spectra 19-24 below to their corresponding structures S-X.

Structures:

Spectrum 19:

Spectrum 20:

Spectrum 21:

Spectrum 22:

Spectrum 23:

Spectrum 24:

P5.10:  Match the ¹H-NMR spectra 25-30 below to their corresponding structures AA-FF.

Structures:

Spectrum 25:

Spectrum 26:

Spectrum 27:

Spectrum 28:

Spectrum 29:

Spectrum 30:

P5.11:  Match the ¹H-NMR spectra 31-36 below to their corresponding structures GG-LL

Structures:

Spectrum 31:

Spectrum 32:

Spectrum 33:

Spectrum 34:

Spectrum 35:

Spectrum 36:

P5.12: Use the NMR data given to deduce structures.

a ) Molecular formula: C₅H₈O

¹H-NMR:

¹³C-NMR

b) Molecular formula: C₇H₁₄O₂

¹H-NMR:

¹³C-NMR

c) Molecular formula: C₅H₁₂O

¹H-NMR:

¹³C-NMR

d) Molecular formula: C₁₀H₁₂O

¹H-NMR:

¹³C-NMR

P5.13:

¹³C-NMR data is given for the molecules shown below.  Complete the peak assignment column of each NMR data table.

a)

b)

c)

d)

e)

P5.14:  You obtain the following data for an unknown sample.  Deduce its structure.

¹H-NMR:

¹³C-NMR:

Mass Spectrometry:

P5.15:You take a ¹H-NMR spectrum  of a sample that comes from a bottle of 1-bromopropane.  However, you suspect that the bottle might be contaminated with 2-bromopropane.  The NMR spectrum shows the following peaks:

How badly is the bottle contaminated?  Specifically, what percent of the molecules in the bottle are 2-bromopropane?

Challenge problems

C5.1: All of the ¹³C-NMR spectra shown in this chapter include a signal due to CDCl₃, the solvent used in each case.  Explain the splitting pattern for this signal.

C5.2: Researchers wanted to investigate a reaction which can be  catalyzed by the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase in yeast.  They treated 4′-acylpyridine (1) with living yeast, and isolated the alcohol product(s) (some combination of 2A and  2B).

a) Will the products 2A and 2B have identical or different ¹H-NMR spectra? Explain.

b) Suggest a ¹H-NMR experiment that could be used to determine what percent of starting material (1) got turned into product (2A and 2B).

c) With purified 2A/2B, the researchers carried out the subsequent reaction shown below to make 3A and 3B, known as ‘Mosher’s esters’.  Do 3A and 3B have identical or different ¹H-NMR spectra?  Explain.

d) Explain, very specifically, how the researchers could use ¹H-NMR to determine the relative amounts of 2A and 2B formed in the reaction catalyzed by yeast enzyme.

Contributors

• Dr. Dietmar Kennepohl FCIC (Professor of Chemistry, Athabasca University)
• Prof. Steven Farmer (Sonoma State University)
• Organic Chemistry With a Biological Emphasis by Tim Soderberg (University of Minnesota, Morris)
• Chris P Schaller, Ph.D., (College of Saint Benedict / Saint John’s University)