Answer to Question #63862 in General Chemistry for alicia hall

Question

a chemistry student was given the following mixture: poppy seeds, sand, salt, 1 cm diameter steel bbs, and iron filings. he/she has access to the following materials and equipment: beakers, magnets, sieves with 5-mm holes, hot plates, watch glasses, tweezers, coffee filters, and small fish nets. describe how he/she would separate each component from the mixture, what material/equipment he/she would employ, and which property (ies) of matter he/she would use to separate each component from the mixture. in order to obtain all possible points, each component must have all 3 requirements as indicated above. (description of how the material would be separated, materials used in the separation, and physical property (ies) used to separate it.)

Answer 1

1 st step of the component separation from the mixture is using of magnet. He/she should use the magnet for iron filings separation because of presence of a magnetic field in iron and magnet.

2 nd step of component separation is using the tweezer or sieves with 5 mm holes to separate the 1 cm diameter steel bbs from the mixture. He/she should use it because of their size.

3 rd step is separation of poppy seeds. It can be realized because of low density of poppy seeds (compare to water). At first he/she should put the mixture in the beaker and mix it with water, and with time poppy seeds and sand will separate by the different levels of beaker because of their densities: poppy seeds density less than density of water (will be on the top of beaker), sand have more density than density of water (will be on the bottom of beaker). After he/she should use a small fish nets to remove poppy seeds from the beaker.

Now he/she have solution of salt and sand in water. Using of coffee filter he/she can separate sand from the solution – sand is not soluble in water, but salt dissolved completely.

After filtration he/she should separate salt from water.The hot plates can help with this task. He/she should heating this solution till crystal of salt formation. This can be explained by the temperature of vaporization – water have less vaporization temperature than salt.