Chromatography - Science 2018 - Term 2

Last term for science we were learning about a lot of things and one of those things was Chromatography.

Chromatography is when you separate the colours of the substance. Chroma means colour in greek, and graph means picture/photograph.

Below are two pictures of the Chromatography we did. The left one is a normal water-based marker and the right one is a permanent marker.

As you can see in the water-based marker the dot we made faded/disappeared. But in the permanent marker the dot faded slightly because, well, it's permanent.The pigments that dissolve easily dissolve faster, but the ones that don't dissolve very easily, dissolve slower.

What we did was cut up pieces of chromatography paper and draw a line two centimeters from the bottom in pencil. Because if we did it in pen the ink from the pen would mess it all up. We made a thick dot of the ink just on the line and sat it in a test tube. For the water-based pen, we used normal water and filled the test tube just below the line, and for the permanent marker we did the same but used acetone instead of water.