Immiscible rainbow

It takes careful planning and technique to prepare this chemical rainbow. To learn about density and miscibility, freshman chemistry students at Georgia Tech created this colorful demonstration by assembling layers of dyed solvents with different densities. They snapped a picture of the tube in front of the Atlanta skyline.



The students used the following solvents, from top to bottom (least to most dense):



Ethyl acetate

Deionized water

1:1 ethyl acetate:dichlorobenzene

Dilute aqueous calcium chloride

Dichlorobenzene

Concentrated aqueous calcium chloride

Submitted by Jennifer Hill



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