Developing a Cost-effective Assessment Method for Aspirin Using TLC

The drug aspirin is prevalent in the lives of many, being able to reduce fevers, pains, and blood clots. In all drugs, the testing of drug stability is very important as they can be easily influenced by factors such as temperature or pH. Current methods available to test drug stability are expensive and are generally difficult to execute. In this paper, Thin Layer Chromatography(TLC) was employed as an effective method to determine Aspirin's impurity because it is fairly inexpensive and simple to perform. By comparing aspirin samples (one heated and one not) and conducting TLC on them, we discovered that TLC was indeed able to show the product of hydrolysis for the heated sample of aspirin and a clear difference in aspirin concentrations of both. The results suggest that TLC can be an inexpensive and effective alternative to determine the stability of aspirin.