Lab#2- Food Dyes and Beer’s Law

(Lab partner was Rebecca Sparrow)

Theory:

Beer’s Law is a relationship concerning the absorption of the spectrum of visible light and this is tested
by injecting light at various wavelengths and observing how much energy is absorbed by a concentrate.
According to Beer’s Law, A=Ebc, under ideal conditions, a substance’s concentration and its absorption
are directly proportional: a high-concentration solution absorbs more light, and solution of lower
concentration absorbs less light. Since concentration and absorption are proportional, Beer’s Law makes
it possible to determine an unknown concentration of a component after determining the absorption.
The overall goal of this lab was to make a calibration curve with a plot of absorption vs. concentration
for a single dye color.

Procedure:

First we tested the absorption of three food dye colors: Red, Blue and Yellow. We extracted a known
Molarity of each color and placed them in one of three curvet tubes. We measured the wavelength and
maximum absorption of each with a spectrophotometer. After we documented the maximum
absorption the new reduce the amounts and diluted with distilled H20 until the absorption readings
were close to 1. Then we able to compute a ration of dye to H20 to create our “stock solution”. We
then choose the red dye (5.68 x10^-5 M) to progress with our experiments. We used a 1 to 5 ratio of
mixture into a 250Ml flask (20ml of dye and 80 ml of H20). We were able to utilize this stock solution to
continue part 2 of our experiment.

During the 2nd part of the lab be began to develop a ratio of dye and concentration versus the
absorption. The way we performed this experiment was to start out with 11 ml of stock solution and
document the absorption that we noted in the 1st part of our lab. The original dye had a concentration
of 5.68 x 10^-5 M so with a 1 to 5 dilution we recomputed using the formula M1V1 = M2V2. The new
base level Molarity was 1.1136 x 10^-5M. We decided to gradually dilute the “dye to H20” tests by a
factor of 2 ml (11ml of dye, 9 ml and 0 ml of H20, 2 ml of H20) while keeping the total amount of tested
solution to 11ml. We documented the degree of absorption versus the concentration of the dye in the
H20. We plotted these measurements on a beer’s plot and were able to devlopea linear graph and an
equation based on our observations of the red dye.

Experiment Materials

 4 Curvet tubes
 250 ml flask
 Spectrophotometer
 Safety goggles
 Droppers
 20 ml Red Dye
 Distilled H20
Results:

Observations and results from part #1

Color Dye(M) Xmax Wavelength (nm)

Red 0.0000568 2.2 526.1
Yellow 0.000095 2 427.5
Blue 0.000065 1.8 631.1

Red Dye Initial Red Dye & H20 (M) of diluted

Red Dye Initial (M) Volume Volume "Stock"solution
0.0000568 20 (ml) 100 (ml) 0.00001136

Observations and results from part #2

Concentrate
Red Dye (ml) H20 (ml) (M) Absorption
11 0 1.14E-05 1.053
9 2 9.2946E-06 0.949
7 4 7.23E-06 0.727
5 6 5.1636E-06 0.578
3 8 3.09819E-06 0.346
0 11 0 0

Beer's Plot for Red Dye y = 93818x + 0.0437

1.2

0.8

Absorption 0.6

0.4

0.2

0
0.00E+00 2.00E-06 4.00E-06 6.00E-06 8.00E-06 1.00E-05 1.20E-05
Concentrate (M)