I'm doing a science fair project on chromatography and I need some background info. What is chromatography?

3 answers

Useful Science Fair demonstrations are where you demonstrate the separation of colours using paper chromatography. There is a nice forensic type demonstration I do with students. Source a number of different makes of water based black pens (I use white board marker pens and non-permanent Overhead Transparency pens). Write a note from the 'criminal' as a single line with one of the pens on paper. Cut the note into small squares. To transfer the ink to the chromatography paper (I use large filter papers) moisten the sample and press it onto the chromatogrpahy paper ink side down near the bottom of the paper. Then put a line of dots one from each pen next to the sample. Run the sample with water as the solvent like in
http://www.gcsescience.com/e8-chromatography.htm
The pattern from the pen that closely matches the criminals was the one that wrote the note.
The posts by UNKNOWN have been removed because they have been plagiarized from various websites, including some of these:
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Thanks I'm sure my project will be a hit!