Notes

While a few elements had easily identifiable colors, such as iron, sodium, barium, copper, cobalt, and strontium, other elements were more difficult to distinguish, such as potassium and manganese. These metals had different color flames due to the differences in the valence electrons' location from the nucleus, which affects the amount of energy required to move the electron up energy levels and the amount of energy released when it relaxes to the ground state. These variations in energy cause the wavelength and frequency of the wave to change, resulting in different light colors being emitted. Based on the colors of each element, they can be put into order of increasing energy: copper with the lowest amount of energy emitted, manganese, barium, potassium, cobalt, iron, sodium, and strontium with the highest amount of energy emitted. The elements that emitted lower amounts of energy had longer wavelengths with a lower frequency rate, while the elements that emitted higher amounts of energy had short wavelengths with a higher frequency rate.

CONCLUSION
The purpose of the experiment was to identify a set of unknown ions by performing flame tests for several metallic ions. These two unknown ions came to be identified as potassium and strontium, as their solution and flame colors corresponded to those with known elements. However, the flame tests are not valuable for detecting metal ions in a mixture of metal ions, since the different energies emitted by the various metal ions are different. This would result in a mixture of colors, and it would be difficult to distinguish each ion's flame color. The possible difficulties encountered in a flame test could be the lack of a reference as to which color is considered what, since an ion can produce a soft mixture of two colors, instead of a clear vibrant color. A source of error in the experiment could be the possible presence of other solutions or previous solutions on the metal rod. Therefore, when the rod was inserted into the flame, different elements' electrons could be moving resulting in a mixture of various colors visible in the flame. A second source of error could be not inserting the rod for long enough causing a change in the flame color that could have been missed, for example, the flame changed from green to orange, and either color could be misinterpreted as the correct one. A third source of error could be inserting the rod into the wrong part of the flame, which resulted in a somewhat reddish-orange color to be emitted as the rod started to burn. This color could have been misinterpreted as the correct color for an element. These sources of error could be fixed in future studies by conducting multiple trials of the same element in order to ensure that the results are accurate. The lab could also include more elements, and even mixtures to illustrate why this technique is not always efficient to determine the ion.


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