Paper Chromatography Lab

In science class, we did an experiment to compare inks and their compositions. This was intended for us to learn about chromatography; the separation of a mixture through a medium (the chromatography paper) in which the components move at different rates and create different patterns. We chose to explore this topic by using four different colored markers, placing a dot of each color onto one piece of chromatography paper, and observing while the water in the beaker travels up the paper and separates the dyes.

Before we started, we made a hypothesis. Mine was if paper chromatography is done on the ink in the green, red, brown, and black marker, then the green will spread out into different shades of blue and green making a pointed oval shape. The red will separate into different shades of red and yellow. The black will stay black with some shades of gray. Lastly, the brown will spread out into different shades black and brown. I think this because of our previous lab with the green ink and also because

The red ink simply spread out into a long free form shape which just went from dark red to light red. The brown resulted in dark brown, to dark red, to orange, and to yellow. The top included of a little bit of light blue. The shape was more like a wide oval, pointed at the top. The black turned into a very long and thin shape, consisting of pure black in the middle bordered by a dark navy color. The top slowly turned yellow as the water rose up. Lastly, the green ink was just about the same as the previous experiment but this time, only the top was pointed. It was dark blue in the middle, going into green, and finally to yellow. This shows that, using chromatography, we were able to separate the dyes into their key components. Some of the colors in the dyes moved slower than the others which is what resulted in the different patterns and