2011-09-04 12:07:07 UTC
The property of the salt differed from the sand because the salt dissolves in water and sand does not. The property used to separate the sand from the salt was to separate the water and the sand. Before weighing the sand and filter paper, you must wait for the sand to dry if not the water will make the sand and the filter’s mass heavier than it really is. If iron filings were replaced by water you could have used a magnet to separate the the iron filings from the sand because iron is one of the four substances that are magnetic.
In the error analysis if you add the percentages of the silica and sodium chloride you get 99.44. My calculations did not add up to 100% but was very close to the actual value. The percent of error was 0.56. Through the calculations, I ended up having less than we started with. The reason why I did not get up to 100% was because I loss some sand from the beaker therefore made the mass of the sand weigh less. As well as not filling the water up to 10mL which made the mass lighter than it should be. In the data table, if I we to correct my mistakes it would have affected the mass of filter paper and silica and weighing dish and mixture. It would have changed the percent of the sand because if we got all of the sand out the total percent of the silica would have increased.
The purpose of the lab was to separate a mixture of silica and sodium chloride and after separation the data would be used to determine the percentage of each component in the mixture. This experiment was successful because my partner and I did come close to 100%. To improve this lab I would have made sure all my measurements were accurate and could have put more effort into taking the sand out. What I learned from the this lab was was how to separate sodium chloride from sand and