Once you have spotted the TLC plate, you are ready to develop it. Carefully place the TLC plate upright into the developing chamber containing the eluent (figure 2). Make sure the solvent level is not above the origin line containing the spot. If the solvent covers the spot, you will need to start over and prepare a new TLC plate. Technical Note TLC Plate Drawing Tool ACD/ChemSketch Version 8.0 Robin Martin, Ph.D. Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc. Toronto, ON, Canada. Features include proton NMR with peak splitting and highlighting, amino acid and DNA sequence tools, TLC plate drawing tool, Structure-to-Name. Thin layer chromatography (TLC) is a simple and relatively fast analytical tool that is used to measure the extent of a reaction or measure the relative polarity of a molecule. A TLC plate is a sheet of glass that is coated with a thin layer of adsorbent such as silica (or occasionally alumina). TLC plates can be drawn in ChemDraw with our TLC Plate tool. This tool provides a means of analytically representing TLC plates instead of simply storing the original. Including a TLC plate drawing tool. The new tool which has been added to the main toolbar to draw Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC) Plates has been applauded. ChemDraw is the. Free TLC Drawing Tool for Mac Sorry if this is in the wrong sub, but I figured I’d ask for your help. I need to do a formal report for my Organic Chemistry Lab and have to include my TLC plate data.

Introduction

Thin-layer chromatography (TLC) is a very commonly used technique in synthetic chemistry for identifying compounds, determining their purity and following the progress of a reaction. It also permits the optimization of the solvent system for a given separation problem. In comparison with column chromatography, it only requires small quantities of the compound (~ng) and is much faster as well.
Stationary Phase
As stationary phase, a special finely ground matrix (silica gel, alumina, or similar material) is coated on a glass plate, a metal or a plastic film as a thin layer (~0.25 mm). In addition a binder like gypsum is mixed into the stationary phase to make it stick better to the slide. In many cases, a fluorescent powder is mixed into the stationary phase to simplify the visualization later on (e.g. bright green when you expose it to 254 nm UV light).
Preparing the Plate
Do not touch the TLC plate on the side with the white surface. In order to obtain an imaginary start line, make two notches on each side of the TLC plate. You can also draw a thin line with pencil. Do not use pen. Why? The start line should be 0.5-1 cm from the bottom of the plate.

Capillary spotters

Place a melting point capillary and in the dark blue part of the Bunsen burner flame. Hold it there until it softens and starts to sag. Quickly remove the capillary from the flame and pull on both ends to about 2-3 times its original length. If you pull the capillary inside the flame, you will have a 'piece of art', but not a good spotter. Allow the capillary to cool down, and then break it in the middle. Make sure that you break off the closed end on one of them. Do not use gloves when you pull capillaries. You will have much better control without them!

Watch movie how to pull capillaries here here

Spotting the plate

The thin end of the spotter is placed in the dilute solution; the solution will rise up in the capillary (capillary forces). Touch the plate briefly at the start line. Allow the solvent to evaporate and spot at the same place again. This way you will get a concentrated and small spot. Try to avoid spotting too much material, because this will deteriorate the quality of the separation considerably (‘tailing’). The spots should be far enough away from the edges and from each other as well. If possible, you should spot the compound or mixture together with the starting materials and possible intermediates on the plate. They will serve as internal reference since every TLC plate is slightly different.

Tlc Plate Drawing Tool Download

Developing a Plate
A TLC plate can be developed in a beaker or closed jar (see picture below). Place a small amount of solvent (= mobile phase) in the container. The solvent level has to be below the starting line of the TLC, otherwise the spots will dissolve away. The lower edge of the plate is then dipped in a solvent. The solvent (eluent) travels up the matrix by capillarity, moving the components of the samples at various rates because of their different degrees of interaction with the matrix (=stationary phase) and solubility in the developing solvent. Non-polar solvents will force non-polar compounds to the top of the plate, because the compounds dissolve well and do not interact with the polar stationary phase. Allow the solvent to travel up the plate until ~1 cm from the top. Take the plate out and mark the solvent front immediately. Do not allow the solvent to run over the edge of the plate. Next, let the solvent evaporate completely.

TLC chamber for development e.g. beacher
with a lid or a closed jar

after ~5 min

after ~10 min

after drying

Tlc Plate Drawing Tool Free

Visualization

Reagent	Works well for	Colors	Notes
Iodine	Unsaturated and aromatic compounds	Brown spots	Not permanent
Sulfuric acid	General stain	Brown or black spots
Chromic acid	For difficult to stain compounds	Black spots
UV light	Compounds with extended conjugation like aromatic compounds	Pink on light green background	Only visible under UV light
Cerium sulfate	Good general stain, very well for alkaloids
Ferric chloride	Phenols	Purple
Ninhydrin	Amino acids, amines	Purple
2,4-Dinitrophenylhydrazine	Aldehydes, ketones	Yellow/orange	also called “DNP”
Vanillin	Good general stain, very well for hydroxyl or carbonyl compounds	Colors vary
Potassium permanganate	Works well for all compounds that can be oxidized	Yellow on purple Yellow or lig