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How to Make a Solution Using a Solvent & a Solute

In movies, chemists are always looking at test tubes or beakers of colorful liquids. Chemists actually deal with gases and solids as well as liquids, although most laboratory substances are liquids. Gases are hard to contain and solids are hard to mix with other substances. Often, the liquids that the chemists are looking at are solutions ̵1; mixtures of substances. Solutions are actually more complicated than sugar mixed into a cup of coffee. In fact, some solutions do not involve liquids at all.

Instructions

- 1
  Learn the terms before you can hope to understand solutions. Solutions are mixtures of substances where one substance breaks apart and disappears completely into another substance that remains relatively unchanged. The substance that dissolves is called the solute and the substance that remains relatively unchanged is called the solvent.
- 2
  Make a distinction between solutions and mixtures. If you put sugar in water, the sugar can be made to break down and disappear and the water looks unchanged. The sugar is uniformly distributed throughout.
- 3
  Put sand in water and it will never mix no matter how much it is stirred. The bottom of the container will contain much more sand that the top of the container. Water plus sand is a mixture, not a solution.
- 4
  Apply some form of energy, such as stirring or heat to make the solute go into the solution. Typically, you can dissolve more solute in a solvent at a high temperature than at a lower temperature. Putting more solute in a solution at a high temperature and then lowering the temperature produces a high viscosity, gel-like liquid called a super-saturated solution.

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