Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

when i put artificial coloring into water and i tryed to clean the water with this device that i made and it works by evaporatation but when it cleaned the water the a. coloring was still there y??? is it like the atom in the h20 gets like colored??? oh no !!!

I'm not sure I follow exactly what you observed.

If you disolve something (say food coloring) in water, then you have something called a solution. Water isn't the only thing that can evaporate (change into a gas phase). If you heated the solution to form water vapor and then condensed the vapor in another container and the color came with it, then you also evaporated your coloring agent and condensed it as well.

If you observed that the color did not end up in your condensate, then the coloring agent didn't evaporate and condense. I suspect that you were hoping to separate them, so I suspect that this wasn't what you observed.

To figure out what actually happened, you need to look up the chemical properties of your coloring agent, particularly its vapor state properties.