Q. How to calculate Percent Yield?

Ans.

When you make cookies the recipe may claim to make a certain number of them, but usually in the end there are less. There might be fewer cookies of a number of reasons: maybe a batch burnt in the oven, maybe you like to eat cookie dough, maybe you didn't do a good job scraping the bowl.

When we calculate the output of a chemical reaction, just like a cookie recipe, we are determining the ideal number of products formed. There are often environmental factors which get in the way of achieving our theoretical value of product. Temperature can make a reaction faster or slower, the reactants might not be completely pure or maybe a lot of evaporation takes place during the reaction.

In any real world reaction the actual amount produced (or yielded) is smaller than the theoretical amount.

We calculate the difference between these two amounts with a percent yield calculation.

The Actual Yield is the real amount that you get at the end of your experiment.

The Theoretical Yield is obtained through careful calculations.