Hi friends, welcome to my blog once again. Our todays topic is about Chloroform. I think that you people will have some idea about what is chloroform. But not well known about it. So let’s know fully about it… Chloroform was discovered in July 1831 by the American physician Samuel Guthrie , and independently a few months later by the French chemist Eugene Soubeiran and Justus von Liebig in Germany, all of them using variations of the haloform reaction. Soubeiran produced chloroform through the action of chlorine bleach powder (calcium hypochlorite) on acetone (2-propanone) as well as ethanol. Chloroform was named and chemically characterised in 1834 by Jean-Baptiste Dumas.
In 1847, the Edinburgh obstetrician James Young Simpson first used chloroform for general anesthesia during childbirth. The use of chloroform during surgery expanded rapidly thereafter in Europe. In the United States, chloroform began to replace ether as an anesthetic at the beginning of the 20th century; however, it was quickly abandoned in favor of ether upon discovery of its toxicity, especially its tendency to cause fatal cardiac arrhythmia analogous to what is now termed "sudden sniffer's death".
Industrially, chloroform is produced by heating a mixture of chlorine and either chloromethane or methane. At 400-500 °C, a free radical halogenation occurs, converting the methane or chloromethane to progressively more chlorinated compounds.
CH4 + Cl2 → CH3Cl + HCl
CH3Cl + Cl2 → CH2Cl2 + HCl
CH2Cl2 + Cl2 → CHCl3 + HCl
Chloroform undergoes further chlorination to give CCl4:
CHCl3 + Cl2 → CCl4 + HCl
The output of this process is a mixture of the four chloromethanes: chloromethane, dichloromethane, chloroform (trichloromethane), and carbon tetrachloride, which are then separated by distillation.
Thus finally chloroform is obtained.
I think that this post will surely help you a lot in knowing about Chloroform and its preparation… Thanks a lot for reading this post and keep in touch…
