Separating Mixtures – Sifting

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Let's look at the process of sifting to separate a mixture.
Here we have a dish of sand and a dish of gravel. Sand is made up of tiny rock particles, while gravel consists of larger rock fragments.

Let's pour them into a larger container and give it a stir. This forms a mixture of sand and gravel. The two materials are now combined, and the individual grains of sand and pieces of gravel are distributed throughout the mixture.

How could we separate this mixture to get just sand and gravel again? One way would be to pick out the gravel stones one by one, but that would take a long time, especially if we have a large amount of the mixture.

Fortunately, we can use a tool called a sieve to make this task much easier. A sieve is a tool made of a fine wire mesh or perforated metal sheet with evenly sized holes. The holes are big enough to let the sand pass through but small enough to stop the gravel.

The process of separating a mixture of solids using a sieve is called sifting. Sifting allows us to quickly and efficiently separate materials based on the size of their particles.

Let's see this in action! We'll use the sieve to separate our mixture of sand and gravel.

The mixture is poured into the sieve, and the sieve is gently shaken from side to side. As the sieve is agitated, the sand grains fall through the holes in the mesh, while the larger gravel pieces remain on top of the sieve.

Now that we've separated the mixture, we can pour the sand back into its original dish and the gravel back into its dish. The sifting process has successfully separated the mixture into its individual components, sand and gravel, based on the difference in particle size.