Purpose:
To separate out four components of a mixture using their unique properties in order to better understand matter: substances vs mixtures and their definitions as well as to better understand phase changes as well as physical vs chemical change.
Materials:
-Beakers -Graduated cylinder
-metal screen -tongs
-ring stand -bunsen burner
-ring -wire gauze
-hot plate -crucible
-clay triangle -balance
-magnet -stirring rod
-plastic bag -paper towels
-cotton -distilled water
-funnel -filter paper
Procedure:
Weigh the mixture using one of the coffee filters (zero out scale)
This is your initial total mass
Sift the mixture into a baggie (separating out the rocks)
Weigh sifted out rocks on scale …show more content…
The rocks were first to be separated out with the aid of a sifter. The sifter allowed the small grains of sand, salt, and iron to go through while catching the rocks because of the rocks unique property: size, Once the rocks had been separated from the grainy mixture, a magnet was used to isolate the iron out because of iron’s unique property of being magnetic . This left the sand and salt, and so In order to set the sand apart from the salt we added water to the mixture to dissolve the salt. Then we strained out the water with coffee filter leaving the sand behind using sand’s unique property of size/shape (being a solid allowed it to be left behind). Finally to get the salt out of the salt water, we allowed for evaporation to occur using the salts property of solubility. Ultimately our goal was obtained as the whole procedure left each component of the mixture …show more content…
Our data almost exactly matches that of the theoretical data, as our total initial mass was 23.1 grams and our final total was 22.8 grams. This gives us a difference of .3 grams and a percent error of 1.3%. Although our masses were slightly off our method was practical for recovering the substances in our mixture. We properly used unique properties of each component to physically separate them from the mixture. the error comes not from our method, but from minor human errors such as: sand grains scattering, the water not boiling all the way out, and etc. the procedure of ours could be reused for reasonable quantities as our goals were ultimately reached with minor percent