February 17th 2011

Today in class, we preformed a lab. Our task was, to seperate iron filings, saw dust, sugar, and sand. They are all frozen into an ice cube. My group decided to melt the ice leaving all the objects in the water. need First, we will try to pick up the iron ingots using a magnetic. Since the iron will be attracted to the magnet, all the iron will be taken out of the mixture when we pass the magnet through the mixture.

Next, we need to think of a way to remove saw dust. Saw dust is less dense than water, so it will float. Sand has a higher density than water so it will sink. We can use a coffee filter to separate the saw dust from the water. We can filter it again to remove the sand.

A big problem we face is to find the sugar. Sugar disolves in water so we can't scoop it out like saw dust or sand. Sugar isn't magnetic so the magnet wouldn't attract it. But, if we were to evaporate the water, the water would leave because of evaporation. If the water the leaves all the sugar would stay behind in the cup. We preformed the experiment. We melted the ice using a heated plate. Then we seperated all the materials using the designed procedures. Our results are-

Sand= 0.3 g

Wood chips= so light it was basically nothing

Iron Filing- 0.8 g

Water + sugar= 24

Total Mixture- 25.1

Assumptions- We might have spilled some iron fillings because they are so small.

Also we haven't evaporated it because evaporation of water takes a long time and we don't have that much time. If you really want to see how much sugar there, is evaporate the water until it all disappears and the sugar is left over.

If anyone ever wants to do this experiment, make sure you NEVER lean over the heated plate(Yuji) because you and your shirt will not like it.

Why on earth would we need to know whats inside water and how we can separate each part from the water??

Well, if you needed to find whats inside an ice piece, lake, pond, or stream you can extract any items in it. You can use things as evaporation, magnetism, or filtering like we did in the experiment.

ZK