Separation of a heterogeneous Mixture


The Purpose/Problem of this lab was to separate an heterogeneous mixture that was made up between an iron (element),  salt (compound), and sand (a mixture).

Background information that I already knew was that we needed filtration in this lab, and to do this we needed filter paper, funnel, and a beaker. Since I remember there was a game that had iron in it that you would you use a magnet to move the iron around I thought of using a magnet to separate the iron from this mixture.

Materials we used in this lab were; goggles, graduated cylinder, wooden rack, hot hand, more then one beaker, hot plate, a stand, more then one filter funnel, scale, school brand paper towel, magnet, and a scraper.

Procedure:

1.) Put goggles over your eyes, and wear close-toed shoes.
2.) Mass the mixture of sand, salt, and iron all together.
3.) Put a paper towel around a magnet, and dip the magnet into the mixture of sand, salt, and iron.
4.) Slowly, pull up magnet half-way out of paper towel, to let all of the iron fall into it.
5.) Put the iron left in the paper towel into a separate beaker of 150 mL.  Record the mass of the iron.
6.) Fill a graduated cylinder to 20 mL of water.
7.) Take a funnel and fold a circle piece of filter paper to fit inside of it.  Put this funnel into the wooden rack.
8.) Take the 20 mL of water and pour it into the beaker with sand and salt.
9.) Pour the mixture from #6 into the funnel on the wooden rack.  Scrape all of the mixture into the funnel, and make sure you put a beaker underneath to catch the salt water falling through the funnel.
10.) After the mixture is finished dripping into the beaker, take the filter paper out and dry the sand. Let the sand sit over-night to dry thoroughly, and when there is no more water in the sand, mass the sand alone and record it the next day.
11.) Take the beaker with the salt and water on a hot plate, and bring it to a boil.
12.) Use the “hot hand” glove to pick up boiling mixture off of the hot plate.
13.) Let the mixture cool and mass the salt in the beaker.

Be careful when using the hot plate because you can burn yourself. Plus make sure you have your goggles on at ALL times or something may get into your eyes.


Separation of the heterogeneous mixture before and after

The three substances:	Mixture after separation in grams:	Mixture before separation:

36.60 g
Iron 	2.01g	//////////////////
Sand 	13.66g	//////////////////
Salt	1.37g	//////////////////


Calculations:  I zero’d out all the beakers in this lab.

2)

1.37 divided by 36.60 x 100: 4% of salt.

2.01 divided by 36.60 x 100: 5% of Iron.

13.66 divided by 36.60 x 100: 37% of sand.

3)

2.01g + 13.66 g + 1.37 g divided by 36.60 x 100: 19%

Conclusion: The main purpose of this lab was to separate an heterogeneous mixture that was made up between iron (an element),  salt (a compound), and sand (a mixture). A technique used to separate the mixture was using filtration that was the best way to filter the salt and sand. Before doing that you had to use the magnet and separate the iron from the mixture. Though in this lab since it wasn’t a homogeneous mixture (universal throughout) someone might of had more salt than someone else or more sand or even more iron, making it so every ones data is different yet we all got around the same amount of the mixture in grams. There still had to of been labs errors because I only got 46% out of a 100% of the mixture there after separation. Matter just doesn’t go away on it’s own, some things that might have gone wrong was; I might of over boiled the salt making it so I lost some. I might of not scraped all the sand or salt from the filter paper. Some of the mixture might of got on the counter then disposed of. From all this we can see that you can separate a mixture like this heterogeneous one though you might get errors.



Analysis Questions:

1) Iron > sand > salt. I separated the mixture in the order I did because you have to take the iron out first. If you don’t then it will become wet and you won’t be able to separate the iron. Then after separating the iron you then had to filter the sand and salt.

2) Filtration;

7.) Take a funnel and fold a circle piece of filter paper to fit inside of it.  Put this funnel into the wooden rack.
8.) Take the 20 mL of water and pour it into the beaker with sand and salt.
9.) Pour the mixture from #6 into the funnel on the wooden rack.  Scrape all of the mixture into the funnel, and make sure you put a beaker underneath to catch the salt water falling through the funnel.
10.) After the mixture is finished dripping into the beaker, take the filter paper out and dry the sand.

Sand is a mixture.

3) When you’re doing the filtration the salt is wet making it so it will drip into the beaker from the funnel and then you will have to boil it to get salt. Salt is a compound.

Sean