Food Dyes Lab

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Comparing M&M’s Dye to Food Dye Lab Report Wright State University General Chemistry Zachary Ewing 19M Jamie Jackson Purpose: The purpose of this lab was to understand the technique of Chromatography and its two phases, awhile also observing Chromatography in action with the different M&M’s coloring and the different food dyes. Introduction: Chromatography can be described as multiple methods to separate and examine of colorful mixtures. Chromatography contain two different phases, mobile and Stationary. Mobile phase is said to be the phase where each different color component each moves at a different pace and time. The Stationary phase can be said to be the phase where the different components of the colors do not move, they are…show more content…
After covering the beaker we started to mark our chromatography paper for the first one for the M&M’s and the second one was for food dye. At the bottom of the paper we drew a 1 cm from the bottom and made a horizontal line across the paper and made tick marks 2 cm apart. We then label with a pencil where each tick mark will be a different color. After doing this we started with the food dye first. We placed each of the colors on the pre-chosen tick mark. After putting about 2-3 drops of food dye on each tick mark using halves of toothpicks, which we let each drop dry in-between. After each dye drop on the paper looked dark we then put it into the 600 ml beaker that was filled with the solution and then quickly cover with the parafilm. We would then set that to the side and repeats the following steps with the M&M’s. Since we had limit resources the M&M’s separation of colors was already done for us, because we moved slowly. After the solution reached close to a 1 cm to the…show more content…
After this we used a pencil and marked through each dark part color on each tick mark and drew an oval around each. We also marked where the solvent line at the top of the paper stopped at. We gave it to our TA to put into the oven for 5 minutes or until dry. We also repeated these steps for the M&M’s portion too. After drying we went to our Food dye data tables and begin to log our tables with the color we viewed, the distance traveled from the tick mark, using our given formula Rf =(Spot Distance)/(Solvent Distance) and also the color intensity we saw in the

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