Purpose: The purpose of the lab was to identify the unknown metallic ions by exciting the electrons of other materials and comparing the color of flame with the color of the unknown substances.
Materials and Procedure: A q-tip dampened with distilled water is rolled in one of the salts. Place the end of the q-tip with the salt in a lit Bunsen burner flame. Then, record the substance excited and the corresponding flame color. Repeat the process until all salts have been tested. Finally, repeat the process on the two unknown salts.
Data:
It was found that Unknown E was sodium. This was confirmed by the pale-yellow flame being emitted when the salt was put in a Bunsen burner flame. Unknown F was also tested and found to be potassium.…show more content… This lets the firework emit a colorful and pretty light in the sky.
Conclusion: The purpose of the lab was to identify the unknown metallic ions by exciting the elections with heat from a Bunsen burner. The purpose was met by comparing the flame color with the flame colors of other elements in the lab. It was found that unknowns E and F were sodium and potassium. This lab offered multiple learning opportunities. It firstly gave a visual example of electrons jumping from the ground state to an excited state. Above that, it also showed how to determine unknown element’s composition by comparing their compositions to other samples. A source of error in the lab was misjudgment of the flame color. The flame colors are hard to determine from each other with the exposure of natural light. This misjudgment may lead to one element not being what it was described to be, or the flame color not being accurate. A solution to this issue would be to let less natural light be exposed to the experiment’s environment. The less amount of light, the easier it is to determine the color of the
