LAB REPORT: By: Brinslea Van Kampen

Long Version – 15 points

Write a lab report that has the following clearly labeled sections:
 Problem – what question where you trying to answer?
We are trying to find the percent of alcohol in this mixture.
 Background Research – explain the distillation apparatus & how it works.
This is what it looks like...

The distillation apparatus is a apparatus that separates different substances from its
original mixture. The distillation apparatus works by boiling rubbing alcohol on a hot
slate and then once the alcohol stars boiling then it starts to evaporate and make
condensation which then the vapor goes into the long glass tube then drips into the
graduated cylinder to collect it to see hoe much alcohol is in Mixture A.
Also explain what you expect your graph to look like & why.
We expect our graph to look like this...
 because the first flat place on the graph is the boiling point of the alcohol so it stays at the
same temperature till all of the alcohol is out of the mixture then once the alcohol
evaporated from the mixture then the temp goes up and the next flat spot is the boiling
point of water, then the water separates from the mixture and evaporates from that point.
And our actual graph that we took from the experiment looks like this...
 Procedure – list the basic steps that you did in bullet or numbered form.
1. First we collected all of our materials
2. put the distillation apparatus together
 3. turned the water on
4. measured 15 ml of alcohol of mixture A
5. poured that into the beaker with a funnel so the alcohol does not go down the glass tube
6. turned the hot slate on so the alcohol can start to boil
7. plug the thermometer into the computer and pushed start on logger pro so we can start to collect
the graph of Time verses temperature
8. let the alcohol boil till it reached 90 degrees because the alcohol boiling point is 80 degrees so
then after the alcohol was done boiling then we had to start collecting the water in a different
graduated cylinder because the boiling point of water is 100 degrees so then we had to collect
the water instead of the alcohol
9. when all of the liquid was gone in the beaker then we turned the hot slate of and stopped our
graph and then collected our information on how much alcohol was in Mixture A.

 Data & Observations

Sample A
Trials: 1 2 Average
Volume of Mix: 15 ML 15 ML 12 ML
Volume of Alcohol: 4.7 ML 5.4 ML 5.05 ML
Percent of Alcohol: 31.30% 36.00% 33.60%
We found out that there was more water in the Sample A than rubbing Alcohol in fact there was
about 1/3 of alcohol and 2/3 of water.

 Conclusion – answer the lab’s question and refer to your data to support your answer.
We found out that in Mixture A there was about 1/3 of alcohol in the mixture because
according to our chart we had on average 33.60% of alcohol in mixture A.
 Evaluation – how confident are you of your conclusion? Is there anything you would do
different if you were to do this again? I am confident because we tested it twice and
compared with other groups and they had around the same amount that we had. If I had
to do it again what I would do different is try a different mixture and compare with more
than two groups to get a sense of what they had for their answers and if we were on the
right page not.
 Future Questions – write at least 2 questions related to this lab that could be answered with
more time in lab. They should start with the phrase, “I wonder if…?”

I wonder if we tried mixtures B and C if they had more or less alcohol in them then Mixture A.

I wonder if we kept the temperature on a low number like 2 or 3 if the alcohol would evaporate faster
or slower and if we would have more accurate results.