What are some examples of where seperation of a mixture might be necessary in a lab?
During organic synthesis, you may need to remove the solvent from your product. This can be achieved by special equipment which evaporates it under cotrolled conditions. Likewise, if you’ve made something in aqueous solution, you may need to recrystalise it. This involves removing most of the water gently over time and then filtering. Production of alcoholic spirits is only possible with distillation, another method of mixture separation. I’ve also purified solvents by distillation, removing any extraneous matter which could interfere with my procedure. There is the use of chromatography to separate the components of a mixture to see what is there. I used this when working in a lab testing race horse urine for drugs. Then there are the efforts to find new and better ways to separate out cyanide from gold mine run-off. Mixture separations of many types happen continuously in most labs.
