20/20

Well done!

Braiden Wills and Owen Daugherty

Honors Chemistry
9/30/16
Separating Mixtures Lab
Materials
Sand, salt, and iron filing mixture
Scale
4 beakers
Water
2 magnets
Hot plate
Funnel
Filter paper
Analytical balance
Ring stand with iron ring
Scoopula
Plastic pipette
Paper

Procedure
Organize all needed items into the work area being used
Spread out mixture onto a piece of paper using the scoopula
Use the magnets to remove the iron filings from the mixture
Remove the iron filings from the magnets and place them in a separate beaker.
Measure the mass of the iron filings.
Pour the remaining mixture of salt and sand into another beaker and fill it with
water
Use the plastic pipette to mix the solution together so that the salt dissolves in the
water
Fold the filter paper into a cone like shape and place it in the funnel
Place the funnel into an iron ring on a ring stand and place a beaker underneath the
iron ring. Slowly pour the sand, salt, and water mixture into the filter paper now on
the iron ring so that the filter paper can separate the sand and salt water.
Once the sand and salt water has completely filtered, start boiling the water using a
hot plate to remove the salt from the water. While you wait for this to finish, find
the mass of the sand that you separated.
Once the water has completely boiled, find the mass of the salt that is left over.
Find the percentage error of your recorded masses of iron, salt, and sand. To do
this, use the equation: |(actual amount-experimental amount)/(actual amount)| x
100. Record down your percentage error for each substance.

Final Results

Iron Filings
Salt
Sand
Mass
1.03 g
10.71 g
7.31 g
Percentage Error
39.6%
10.1%
38.7%
Conclusion
During this lab, there were several occasions when an error could have occurred. As
an example, on one occasion when we were using a piece of paper to hold the salt
and sand mixture, some of the material slid off of the paper and onto the table. We
swept the materials back onto the paper and into a separate beaker to remedy the
problem this time, but to prevent this from happening in the future, we would not
use something like a piece of paper that the materials could easily slide off of when
working with materials such as sand and salt. Another possible source of error
occurred after filtering out the sand from the saltwater when some of the sand
particles stuck to the filter paper, which made it difficult to get an accurate mass for
the sand. To fix this problem, we could first take the mass of just the filter paper,
then take the mass of the filter paper with the sand inside it and subtract the mass
of the filter paper from the mass of the filter paper with the sand in it to find the
mass of the sand. Finally, an error could have occurred because we couldnt get all
the iron particles off of the magnets that we used to collect the iron. We could fix
this problem in a similar way to the way we fixed the problem with the sand sticking
to the filter paper. We could take the mass of just the magnets we used, then take
the mass of the magnets with the iron filings attached to them, then subtract the
mass of the magnets from the total mass of the magnets and the iron to find the
mass of the iron.