An Efficient Microscale Procedure for the Synthesis of Aspirin

The synthesis of aspirin is a part of many undergraduate organic synthesis labs and is frequently used in qualitative organic analysis laboratory for the identification of salicylic acid. We have found that aspirin can be synthesized on microscale by a simple and efficient procedure that eliminates the heating step employed in literature procedures and gives a pure, ferric-negative product (no purple color with alcoholic ferric chloride solution).