LOW-COST AND EASY ACCESS MATERIALS FOR A LABORATORY CLASS: A PROPOSAL OF LIQUID CHROMATOGRAPHY FOR FOOD COLORING SEPARATION AS AN EXPERIENCE OF MEANINGFUL LEARNING

The experimental activities for undergraduate chemistry students play an important role to develop skills and expertise in that science thus, the practice-experimental classes are so important to achieve this purpose. This work deals with a demonstrative experience for dye separation from food coloring sample using liquid column chromatography. Beyond the experimental practice and the facility in visualizing the separation, this demonstration shows how a simple experiment involving alternative and easy access materials can promote a meaningful learning once it is possible to handle the acquired data, trace and analyze the results themselves, thus developing skills rather than the operational procedure. This proposal could be implemented in initial chemistry classes in Brazilian universities. Sea and river sands were used as stationary phases and aqueous ethanolic solutions were used as mobile phases. A food coloring (a mixture of 3 dyes) was chosen as sample to be studied. Chromatographic separation was followed by spectrophotometric measurements. A set of analyses were carried out to discuss the solubility of the food coloring, granulometric studies of the stationary phases used and electronic microscopy images of the sands studied here. As alternative materials were used in this work, a chromatographic column was also constructed with low-cost materials.