CSIRO - Student resource: Oceans

[RosalieL]

Has anyone done this set of pracs? Specifically station 5.

Instructions are:

1. Use the equipment provided to attempt to desalinate one of the 5ml samples of salt water. Plan your experiment and show your plan to your teacher before starting.

2. How much desalinated water have you managed to harvest from the 5ml sample of salt water?

3. How much water was "lost" in the process? How was this water lost?

4. Evaporate desalinated water in a clean evaporating basin to see if there is any salty residue in it.

(then there is a series of questions for them to answer).


The equipment I am supposed to provide is:

5ml samples of water, filter paper, beakers, funnels, evaporating dishes and basins, bunsen, tripod, flasks, ice, measuring cylinder

I spoke to the teacher about it today and neither of us can work out how they are supposed to set up the equipment in order to catch the desalinated water. If any of you have ideas/suggestions I would love to hear them!! I am obviously not thinking outside the box enough because I wanted to just give them a distillation kit! The teacher does not want them using those...

[Rowanne]

sorry for the crude picture(spelling errors and all) I don't have my phone on me to take a photo. This is the best I could think of but it needs some tubing? Is the idea for the student to figure it out themselves ? It doesn't use up all of the equipment and i don't even know if it would work.
anyway good luck If they can'y have tubing, putting the funnel on an angle may and positioning the measuring cylinder underneath may work?

[RosalieL]

Thanks Rowanne! Maybe I will add in some tubing. What you've come up with looks good. Yeah, I think they are supposed to work it out for themselves but neither the teacher or I could come up with something that worked with that list of equipment! So it seemed a bit rough to expect the kids to come up with something and if any of them get stuck they will need a prompt in the right direction.