Seperation Techniques

Well i didn't really get to do any of these labs because i've been gone, but i understand a few of the concepts we're going over. We did a fun little thing today where you have a little circular filter, and you mark on it with whatever colors or designs you want. Then we got a petri dish and put water in the bottom of it, rolled up a little piece of paper towel and stuck it in the middle of our filter paper. You want to only let the bottom of the piece of rolled up paper towel touch the bottom, not the whole filter paper (like i did) haha. But i guess it still came out okay. The water comes up the paper towel and soaks into the filter paper and spreads the ink out all around the filter paper. If you want it to get all of the ink you put on the paper you can put multiple pieces of paper towels in different places, because sometimes if you just have one in the middle it won't reach the whole thing and spread all of your colors. This was called chromatography. Mr. Ludwig also showed us the centrifuge and how it separates the mixtures as it spins. He only used a sandy-muddy mixture with water but it was still pretty cool to see how it worked. They usually use it with blood to separate the blood and the plasma from each other. Filtration is when you filter something to get the bigger pieces or solids out of a liquid or something that you are draining. I didn't really get to do much in class of the other stuff, but from what i did learn in class i learned that distillation is the evaporation and condensation of a liquid when water is boiled in a cool receiver.


Chromatography Field: