Reconstructing the historical synthesis of mauveine from Perkin and Caro: procedure and details

• Author(s): Cova, Tânia F. G. G. ; Pais, Alberto A. C. C. ; Melo, J. Sérgio Seixas de
• Date: 2017
• Persistent ID: https://hdl.handle.net/10316/108390
• Origin: Estudo Geral - Universidade de Coimbra
• Document Type: Journal article
• Language: English

Description

Mauveine, an iconic dye, first synthesised in 1856 still has secrets to unveil. If nowadays one wanted to prepare the original Perkin's mauveine, what would be the procedure? It will be described in this work and lies on the use of a 1:2:1 (mole) ratio of aniline, p-toluidine and o-toluidine. This was found from a comparison of a series of products synthesized from different proportions of these starting materials, with a set of historical samples of mauveine and further analysed with two unsupervised chemometrics methods.

FEDER (Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional) through COMPETE (Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade).