Introduction
Reduction reactions are very important in chemistry as they are effective processes for synthesizing new compounds from existing ones. In organic chemistry, a compound is said to be reduced if it acquires new hydrogen. There are diverse reagents for carrying our reduction reactions. Two of these are sodium borohydride (NaBH4) and lithium aluminum hydride (LiAlH4) - the latter is a more powerful reducing agent compared to the former. In this experiment, NaBH4 was used to reduce p-Nitrobenzaldehyde to form p-Nitrobenzyl alcohol. NaBH4was used over LiAlH4 in this experiment, because LiAlH4 would also reduce the nitro group of the aldehyde.
Experimental:
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