Gas Chromatography Lab Report

Words: 545
Pages: 3

This week’s experiment is important in the purification and determination of the portion a compound makes up in a given a mixture. Distillation is the process of heating a liquid to boiling and then collecting the condensed vapors. With these condensed vapors, a gas chromatography can be employed, to determine the relative portion of a compound in a given mixture. This por-tion is shown as a percent area on a gas chromatography graph. This percent area is important as it helps explain the physical properties, such as boiling point of a mixture. When observing the percent area of all the fractions, hexane always had a great-er than 89.44% percent area, except in fraction 3 of the hexane and heptane solution that was determined by Holly and Patrick. …show more content…
All of the boiling point ranges resembled that of hexane’s boiling point of 68 degree Celsius, because of its strong presences in each of the fractions. When looking at the data that was retrieved from Holly and Pat-rick for the hexane-heptane solution. There might have been an error in the retrieving of fraction 3 shown in Figure 3, as the boiling point range of 59.5 to 61.6 degrees Celsius does not ex-plain the 41.88 hexane area and the 58.12 heptane area. If the heptane area was truly higher than the boiling point range should have shown that by resembling, heptane’s boiling point of 98.42 degrees Celsius. This error in calculation has to have stemmed from the gas chromatography machines, which is justi-fiable as they are in need of service. To also give a more definite answer the machine could have easily been exposed to water as the student workers started to skip precautions of checking for water in the fractions being tested. The presence of water could have easily damaged the gas chromatography’s column. Another error that is seen within the data that was obtained is in the low boiling points that were