Question

How can you separate red and blue ink using chromatography

Answer 1

Biros, felt tips, marker pens.. a pen is an everyday item, found in a myriad of colours and for all uses. But what if I told you that black ink isn’t just black; or brown isn’t brown.
In many pens the ink used is a mixture of chemicals that are brought together to achieve the desired colour and consistency, relying on the use of primary colours (blue, green, red) to generate all the others.
We can study the contents of different inks using a technique called chromatography, literally “drawing a colour graph”. Chromatography is the science of separation and is used in the chemical industry in many forms from purifying chemicals in a reaction, studying the contents of water, to testing for the presence of illegal compounds in athletes.
Compounds in a mixture will interact with a liquid and an absorbent material in different ways, allowing for separation to occur. In the same way that scientists can separate and study 100’s of chemicals in the human body we can turn the black ink into its components.