Lab Report: Separation Of A Mixture Of Sand And Salt

Nupoor Matieda October 10, 2014
PD 9/10 Lab Report
Separation of a Mixture of Sand and Salt
Goal(s): To separate a mixture of sand and salt and to find the percent of each component by mass of each mixture
Background Theory:
A mixture is a combination of two or more pure substances in which each pure substance retains its individual chemical properties. Mixtures can be separated by physical processes such as filtration and evaporation. Filtration is a process where solids and liquids can be separated. The liquid that passes through the filter paper is called a filtrate. Evaporation is a process where two liquids or a solid mixed into a liquid can be separated. To separate two liquids mixed together, the liquid
The five common methods that can be used to separate various types of mixtures are filtration, fractional distillation, evaporation, sublimation, and chromatography. Evaporation is the changing of a liquid into a gas often under the influence of heat. A mixture of a solid and liquid can be separated by evaporation. Filtration is a technique that uses a porous barrier to separate a solid from a liquid. A liquid and solid (heterogeneous mixture) is the type of mixture that can be separated by filtration. Sublimation is the process during which a solid changes vapor without melting (without going through liquid phase). Two solids are the type of mixture that can be separated by sublimation. Fractional distillation is a physical separation technique that use based on differences in the boiling points of the substances involved. Two liquids are the type of mixture that can be separated by distillation. Chromatography is a technique that separates a compound of a mixture dissolved in either a gas or a liquid. A mixture of a gas or liquid state can be separated by the use of chromatography.
4. Chromatography is a method that could be used to separate the components of the ink in a marker. This separation can be achieved when the pigment is dipped in a liquid and the different colors will behave differently, causing them to travel at different speeds. The ink separates because each pigment has a different attraction to the
Both of the goals were met by filtering a mixture of salt sand and water, which were mixed together, that allowed sand separate from the salt and water and then we evaporated the water, which caused the salt to remain. To find the percent of the salt we proportioned 0.14g/2.88g to x/100 which gave us 4.86%. Then to find the percent of sand we subtracted the percent of salt from 100 to get 95.14% of sand. Our lab group found the percent of salt to be 4.86% which was fairly close to the theoretical value of 7.00%. Hence we feel we achieved the goal of the lab. Some reasons our data was not accurate was because salt was splattering when we heated it which caused us to lose salt and the accuracy of our measuring was a little bit off because we were just eyeballing the measurements. The uncertainty of the experiment was ± 0.01g. The experimental error of our lab was