Elements, Compounds, and Mixtures

 To understand how matter is classified by its chemical composition, we must first distinguish
between physical and chemical changes and between physical and chemical properties. A
physical change is a change in the form of matter but not in its chemical identity. Changes of
physical state are examples of physical changes. The process of dissolving one material in
another is a further example of a physical change. For instance, you can dissolve sodium
chloride (table salt) in water. The result is a clear liquid, like pure water, though many of its other
characteristics are different from those of pure water. The water and sodium chloride in this
liquid retain their chemical identities and can be separated by some method that depends on
physical changes.

 Distillation is one way to separate the sodium chloride and water components of this liquid. You
place the liquid in a flask to which a device called a condenser is attached. The liquid in the
flask is heated to bring it to a boil. (Boiling entails the formation of bubbles of the vapor in the
body of the liquid.) Water vapor forms and passes from the flask into the cooled condenser,
where the vapor changes back to liquid water. The liquid water is collected in another flask,
called a receiver. The original flask now contains the solid sodium chloride. Thus, by means of
physical changes (the change of liquid water to vapor and back to liquid), you have separated
the sodium chloride and water that you had earlier mixed together.

 A chemical change, or chemical reaction, is a change in which one or more kinds of matter
are transformed into a new kind of matter or several new kinds of matter. The rusting of iron,
during which iron combines with oxygen in the air to form a new material called rust, is a
chemical change. The original materials (iron and oxygen) combine chemically and cannot be
separated by any physical means. To recover the iron and oxygen from rust requires a chemical
change or a series of chemical changes. We characterize or identify a material by its various
properties, which may be either physical or chemical. A physical property is a characteristic that
can be observed for a material without changing its chemical identity. Examples are physical
state (solid, liquid, or gas), melting point, and color. A chemical property is a characteristic of a
material involving its chemical change. A chemical property of iron is its ability to react with
oxygen to produce rust.
 Substances: The various materials we see around us are either substances or mixtures of
substances. A substance is a kind of matter that cannot be separated into other kinds of matter
by any physical process. Earlier you saw that when sodium chloride is dissolved in water, it is
possible to separate the sodium chloride from the water by the physical process of distillation.
However, sodium chloride is itself a substance and cannot be separated by physical processes
into new materials. Similarly, pure water is a substance
  No matter what its source, a substance always has the same characteristic properties. Sodium
is a solid metal having a melting point of 988 deg C. The metal also reacts vigorously with water.
No matter how sodium is prepared, it always has these properties. Similarly, whether sodium
chloride is obtained by burning sodium in chlorine or from seawater, it is a white solid melting
at 801 deg C.

Elements:
 Millions of substances have been characterized by chemists. Of these, a very small number are
known as elements, from which all other substances are made. Lavoisier was the first to establish
an experimentally useful definition of an element. He defined an element as a substance that
cannot be decomposed by any chemical reaction into simpler substances. In 1789 Lavoisier
listed 33 substances as elements, of which more than 20 are still so regarded. Today 118 elements
are known.

Compounds:
 Most substances are compounds. A compound is a substance composed of two or more
elements chemically combined. By the end of the eighteenth century, Lavoisier and others had
examined many compounds and showed that all of them were composed of the elements in
definite proportions by mass. Joseph Louis Proust (1754–1826), by his painstaking work,
convinced the majority of chemists of the general validity of the law of definite proportions (also
known as the law of constant composition): a pure compound, whatever its source, always
contains definite or constant proportions of the elements by mass. For example, 1.0000 gram of
sodium chloride always contains 0.3934 gram of sodium and 0.6066 gram of chlorine, chemically
combined. Sodium chloride has definite proportions of sodium and chlorine; that is, it has
constant or definite composition.

Mixtures
 Most of the materials around us are mixtures. A mixture is a material that can be separated by
physical means into two or more substances. Unlike a pure compound, a mixture has variable
composition. When you dissolve sodium chloride in water, you obtain a mixture; its composition
depends on the relative amount of sodium chloride dissolved. You can separate the mixture by
the physical process of distillation.
 Mixtures are classified into two types. A heterogeneous mixture is a mixture that consists of
physically distinct parts, each with different properties. The photo below shows a heterogeneous
mixture of potassium dichromate and iron filings.

 Another example is salt and sugar that have been stirred together. If you were to look closely,
you would see the separate crystals of sugar and salt. A homogeneous mixture (also known as
a solution) is a mixture that is uniform in its properties throughout given samples. When sodium
chloride is dissolved in water, you obtain a homogeneous mixture, or solution. Air is a gaseous
solution, principally of two elementary substances, nitrogen and oxygen, which are physically
mixed but not chemically combined. A phase is one of several different homogeneous materials
present in the portion of matter under study. A heterogeneous mixture of salt and sugar is said
to be composed of two different phases: one of the phases is salt; the other is sugar.
  Similarly, ice cubes in water are said to be composed of two phases: one phase is ice; the other
is liquid water. Ice floating in a solution of sodium chloride in water also consists of two phases,
ice and the liquid solution. Note that a phase may be either a pure substance in a particular
state or a solution in a particular state (solid, liquid, or gaseous). Also, the portion of matter under
consideration may consist of several phases of the same substance or several phases of different
substances.

Separation of Components of Mixtures

Most materials found in nature are in the form of mixtures. In engineering, a separation process is used
to transform a mixture into two or more distinct products. This is done by considering that different
components of the mixture may have different properties such as:
 size
 density
 solubility
 electrical charge
 boiling point
 Depending on the raw mixture, various processes can be employed to separate the mixtures.
Often, two or more of these processes must be used in combination to obtain the desired
separation. In addition to chemical processes, mechanical processes are sometimes applied.
In the example of crude oil, one upstream distillation operation feeds its two or more product
streams into multiple downstream distillation operations to further separate the raw crude, and
so on, until final products are purified.

Example separation techniques for mixtures:

 Filtration is used for the separation of solids from fluids (liquids or gases) by interposing a medium
through which only the fluid can pass.
 Distillation for mixtures of liquids with different boiling points.
 Chromatography separates dissolved substances by different interaction with (that is, travel
through) a material.
 Centrifugation and cyclonic separation, separates based on density differences.
 Drying, removes liquid from a solid by vaporization.
 Magnet separation technique uses magnet to separate iron particles from a mixture.

 Chemical engineers use these separation techniques to purify naturally found substances or
isolate them from other substances. For example, crude oil, also called petroleum, is a complex
mixture of carbon and hydrogen (hydrocarbons) that exists as a liquid in the Earth's crust.
Chemical engineers apply various distillation methods to purify various hydrocarbons such as
natural gases, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, lubricating oils, asphalt, etc., from the raw crude oil.
Water purification is another good example of application of separation techniques.