Engineering and fabrication
How do you seperate all five components?
In class, we are doing a separation lab where we have to separate salt, iron filings, sand, PDB, and sulfur. All of these five components have been mixed togther to make a single mixture that weighs one gram. Does anyone have a step-by-step procedure on how to seperate all five components? If you have any ideas, then just please answer. Thanks! =] We are actually going to attempt to do this lab. It's worth four grades! So instead of criticizing and saying that all five components aren't fit to be together, try to help!
Public Comments
- 1. Use a magnet to pull out the Fe.
2. Add water to dissolve the salt and separate that from the rest which are insoluble. You can recover the salt by evaporating the water.
Here's were it gets interesting. The others are all more dense than water, so noting is easily separated based on density. Is this simply an exercise or are you actually going to attempt this?
I would avoid giving students paradichlorobenzene since it is a suspected carcinogen and separating it and sulfur would seem likely to produce some undesirable substances.
Given enough time paradichlorobenzene will simply undergo sublimation and disappear. Heating it will probably hasten the process.
Sulfur is soluble in carbon disulfide or will react with methane to produce CS2. CS2 and H2S, both of which should be handled in a hood. The CS2 is flammable and may very well react with the paradichlorobenzene.
In my professional opinion, the PDF and sulfur are substances that don't lend themselves well to this type of activity.
