Separation Anxiety Lab Report

Sarah Cunningham
Lab Section:10206

Title: Separation Anxiety
Objective
The goal of this experiment was to use separation methods to make potassium nitrate compound the purest substance it can be. By the end of this experiment, certain separation techniques should be understood for the different sample types.
Introduction
It is essential for chemists to know how to separate mixtures when needed. This will come in handy when an element is toxic and cannot be mixed with other elements or compounds(Wood, 2023). It even came in handy back when gold miners needed to separate soil and water to find the gold(Libretexts, 2022). Different separation techniques allowed people to understand mass spectrometry, biomedical substances, and proteins. Techniques

The experiment helped show the physical and chemical properties when they turned into one kind of matter. This experiment also made the students understand and execute vacuum filtrations and extractions. The chemistry behind separation techniques is crucial in order to isolate certain elements so they can’t be changed in the chemical reaction. One form of separating mixtures is evaporation. This technique separates solid substances that were dissolved in a liquid. Filtration is another technique used to separate substances in mixtures to find the purest form of the particles. This separation can filter out bacteria from water, making it safe to drink. (Libretexts, 2022). Sand, KNO3, CuSO4, and mineral oil were the different samples used to separate them back into their pure substances. Ethyl acetate's boiling point is 170.78 degrees F and mineral oil’s boiling point is 500 degrees

Altering the temperature into a cooler state allowed all the KNO3 crystals to reappear again. When dissolving KNO3 and CuSO4 have negative ions are surrounded by water’s positive charges. This is because water is a polar solvent and allowed KNO3 and CuSO4 to separate in water(Wood, 2023).
Finding the masses of all the substances was not 100% accurate. In ranking the smallest difference between original mass and recovered mass was the oil(17.941g), sand(3.990g), CuSO4(6.556g), and the KNO3(2.751g). Factors that contributed to error had been not fully transferring the mixtures from the flask to another container. Another source could have been human error from spillage of some of the components out of the flasks. These variables affected the accuracy and precision of the experiment. The purest sample of KNO3 crystals was not obtained because of these errors. To improve these fallacies, recrystallizing the KNO3 again would have helped get this compound to its purest element possible.