Quantitative Determination of Food Colouring in Jelly Crystals using UV/Vis spectroscopy

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Quantitative Determination of Food Colouring in Jelly Crystals using UV/Vis spectroscopy

Aim : To study specific food colouring agents that shows a specific colour .

           To study the principles of absorbance spectroscopy.

          To tabulate and analyse data from an Excel spreadsheet.

Introduction

        Food colouring are mainly used in the food processing industry today as colour gives the food product certain flavours as people associate colours with certain flavours. Some is to stimulate a colour that is perceived by the consumer as natural food products. Food colouring also provides an identity to foods, to mask natural variations in colour, decorative or artistic purposes or to protect flavours and vitamins from being damaged by light.

        Electron transition occurs when valence electrons in a molecule are excited from one energy level to a higher energy level (Silberberg,2008). The energy change associated with this transition provides information about molecular properties such as colour. Ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometry or UV-Vis refers to absorption spectroscopy in the UV visible spectral region. The absorption in the visible range affects the perceived colour of chemicals used in food products involved. In this region of the electromagnetic spectrum, molecules undergo electronic transitions from the ground state to the excited state

        The Beer-Lambert law states that the absorbance of a solution is directly proportional to the concentration of the solution and the path length. Thus, for a fixed path length, UV/VIS spectroscopy can be used to determine the concentration of  a solution. It is necessary to know how quickly the absorbance changes with concentration. Therefore the equation used is A=Ɛcl  where A is the absorbance, Ɛ  is the molar extinction coefficient, c is the sample concentrations in moles/litre and l is the length of light path through the sample.  The purpose of this experiment is to determine the concentration of the unknown sample.

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Method :

        1g of jelly  crystals was weighed using a laboratory balance and then the crystals was transferred into a 100ml conical flask and dissolved with 50ml of deionised water. The crystals was stirred and then left to be heated awhile to ensure all the crystals in the conical flask was dissolved completely. After heated, the solution of jelly crystals was transferred into a 100ml volumetric flask. The conical flask was rinsed with deionised water several times to ensure all the jelly crystals solution is in the volumetric flask. The filter funnel used was also rinsed a few times to ...

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