The Light, Color And Solutions Experiment

The purpose of the Light, Color, and Solutions experiment was to determine how to use a spectrophotometer, understand the relationship between a solution’s visible color and its color absorption, and to derive, understand, and use Beer’s Law. Some background information that would be helpful included that the color of a solution was determined both by the colors it absorbed as well as the colors it transmitted. For example, if a solution was viewed as the color red, then red light was transmitted by the solution while the complementary color, green, was absorbed.
Beer’s Law stated that the amount of light that passed through a sample was limited by the light’s wavelength, the distance travelled by the light, and the concentration of the substance …show more content…
In such procedures, a monochromatic beam of light was passed through cell structures in order to observe the amount of light absorbed by components, such as proteins and nucleic acids, as a way to determine their concentrations. Another application of Beer’s Law was its use in ascertaining the concentrations of nitrogen in seawater. This was done through the analysis of ammonia concentrations in oceans with the purpose of recording the nitrogen abundance for underwater microorganisms, such as vegetable plankton, to use for …show more content…
This energy absorbed by the substance corresponded to the electron levels and the energy difference between such levels when the spectrophotometer excited the electrons. The fact that each substance possessed a unique electron configuration, specific to the particular substance, the resulting absorption spectrum and wavelengths of light absorbed were exclusive to the distinct substance. This allowed for its identification based off just its absorption spectrum. The maximum absorption peak(s) on the graph, also known as lambda-max, depended on the composition of the substance and indicated the identity of substance because of the use of the comparison between absorption ranges. Likewise, just because a solution is one visible color does not mean it can only apply to one substance. Different substances may absorb the same color of light, but not due to the same rates which means that color seen should not be the only indicator of a substance. Overall it’s better to compare substances to their absorption spectrums rather than their visible