My+thoughts+and+feelings+on+methods+of+seperation

In this reflection, I will be talking about my thoughts and feelings on the methods of separation we have thus learnt so far.

Methods of separations are very important to our lives. They help us obtain clean water to drink, cook, bathe and more. Some others are used for separating compounds into their respective elements too. Allow me to talk about my thoughts on the individual methods separately, as some of them are already explained through the previous article.

DISTILLATION, in my opinion, is a very useful method of separation. It is already EVAPORATION TO DRYNESS itself, and it can also separate a liquid mixture if used correctly, in that case FRACTIONAL DISTILLATION. The disadvantage is that for FRACTIONAL DISTILLATION, you can never truly obtain a pure sample of the liquid, as you must stop it yourself instead of letting it stop by itself. I should say though, if you want to use it on a large scale, that might not be too smart, as it will be costly, unlike EVAPORATION TO DRYNESS.

EVAPORATION TO DRYNESS is a very cheap method of separation, and it occurs often too. Due to this fact, it has its own advantages and disadvantages. The good points of it is that it is able to separate the solids from the mixture of liquid and solids, but it is unable to get the liquid too, unlike DISTILLATION. It is a very cheap methods, as said before, as it can occur anywhere. It is basically making liquid evaporate faster. The bad part is, as it occurs everywhere, you might find that your some of your coffee is lost if you left it in a hot place for quite some time...

ATTRACTION is something I did not quite explain in my previous article. It uses magnet to separate magnetic solids from the others. The good part is, if all the solid particles were of the same size and FILTRATION, something I will move to later, does not work, this might work. This can separate a mixture of iron fillings and salt. The bad part is, firstly you need a magnet, which costs money. For large, magnetic objects, cranes and electromagnets are needed, which are costly. Also, It cannot fully separate water and iron fillings or other magnetic stuffs, as the iron fillings or the other magnetic objects will still be wet.

Finally, I will move on to FILTRATION. I feel that filtration is one of the worst methods of separation. Depending on your needed samples, this process may get quite costly due to the number of equipments needed, and it does not fully filtrate all the smaller particles at times, like mud! Although sand particles are left, they are still wet. This is definitely one of my least favored method of separation.

So, this concludes the main methods of separation we have learnt in the secondary 1 syllabus. What do you think?