Separation Anxiety Lab Report

Formal Lab Report: Lab 6: Separation Anxiety
Objective
The objective of the Separation Anxiety Lab was to plan out and apply different separation techniques depending on the physical and chemical properties of the materials in a mixture. These techniques were used to separate the materials into their pure components.
Introduction
The goal of the Separation Anxiety Lab was to separate components that had been mixed together, which is important for obtaining pure substances, calculating the amounts of products or reactants used in chemistry, or finding out the mass percent of components in a mixture using the formula: mass of A=mass of component Atotal mass100. For a component that can not be separated to find its mass, you use: mass of

The separated mixture was then filtered using vacuum filtration again. Once the filtrate was all pulled through the filter the remaining sand was washed twice with five mL of distilled water. Air was continuously pulled through until the sand was dry. The filtrate was transferred into another 150-mL beaker. The vacuum filtration was cleaned and set up again for the third filtration. The mass of a ceramic weigh boat was taken and recorded, then the dry sand was transferred to the weigh boat and both were weighed and recorded

This was due to the polarity of the substances. Water and CuSO4 are polar molecules, meaning they have unequal sharing of electrons. The partial negative charges of the oxygen atoms of water surround the partial positive charges on the copper atoms of CuSO4 and partial positive charges of the hydrogen atoms in water surround the partial negative charge of the sulfate atoms in CuSO4 causing the molecule to dissociate. The potassium nitrate dissolves in water due to solubility rules, nitrate ions are always soluble in water. A very strong acid would be needed in order to dissolve sand and break apart the bonds, but water is neutral so the sand separated from the filtrate. In order to separate KNO3 and CuSO4, which are both soluble in water, recrystallization was used. The reason the two components can be separated through recrystallization is because of the temperature dependence of solubility, KNO3 is much more soluble in hot water and insoluble in cold water while CuSO4 is only slightly more soluble in hot water. When the filtrate was heated the solution was saturated with KNO3 but when the system was cooled, the KNO3 became insoluble and pure crystals reformed while CuSO4 stayed dissolved in the