Hello everyone, today let's do a simple experiment to understand the basic principles of chromatography.

This is a fun and easy project that you can try yourself with all the ingredients that

you can find at home.

This experiment will help us understand how chromatography can be used to separate a mixture

into its individual components.

We all know that the primary colors are red, yellow and blue and other colors are often

a mixture of different individual colors.

Do you think these different colors can be split into their individual color components?

Let's have a look if chromatography can help us with that.

For this, we need the following things that you can easily find at home.

Firstly, we need some colored candies.

We can take M&Ms or Skittles.

For this experiment, I have taken different colored M&Ms.

This will now be our sample.

Secondly, we will need an eluent.

An eluent is a liquid that will help us separate our sample.

For this, I have taken a disinfectant solution.

You can also try it with clear alcohol, water.

The third thing that we need is a stationary phase.

This is a phase on which we can separate our components.

For this, I have taken a normal tissue paper.

You can also try it out with printing paper, paper towels or maybe some coffee filters.

In addition to these three things, we would need some glass jars, some toothpicks, ruler

and a pencil.

Let's try by dissolving the coating of the M&Ms to get the different color solutions.

For this, we take few drops of water in a petri dish and then we put our candies on

it.

We wait for about 5 minutes to let the color come out completely.

This is how it looks like after 5 minutes.

Now the next step is to prepare our stationary phase.

We keep about 1 cm distance from the bottom.

We draw a line and mark three equidistant spots.

On these spots, we will put our color sample.

Now we put our colored sample onto the stationary phase.

Now we fill our beakers with the element, which is our disinfectant solution to about

0.5 cm height.

We will now dip the edge of the stationary phase in the element and wait for about 8

to 10 minutes.

It is important to dip only the edge of the tissue paper.

This is what happens in the first 5 minutes when the element runs through the stationary

phase.

The waiting time can be anywhere between 5 to 10 minutes.

This depends on what you choose as your stationary phase.

Tissue paper will get soaked up quickly, whereas printing paper will take much longer.

After about 5 minutes, we can see that our samples have traveled up the tissue paper.

Some colors get split into their individual colors, whereas some colors do not travel

the tissue paper at all.

What we can see here on the tissue paper is essentially a chromatogram.