Investigating the rate of diffusion of a

membrane.
Health and Safety:
- Be careful with the knife when cutting the beetroot.
- Wear goggles to avoid getting ethanol in your eyes.

Equipment:
- Beetroot (to be cut).
- Ruler.
- Knife/blade.
- Ethanol.
- 8x Test Tubes.
- Pipettes.
- Colourimeter.
- Cuvettes.
- Temperature-controlled water bath.
- Thermometer.

Procedure:
- Cut the beetroot into 8x 5mm by 5mm by 10mm rectangles (2 will be
used as a control).
- Thoroughly rinse and dry beetroot rectangles and set to one side.
- Label your 8x test tubes with the ethanol percentage concentration you
will add at a later stage.
- Add 100cm3 of water to each of your testing tubes except one.
- Use figure 1 to add ethanol to your test tubes to give them their
correlating ethanol percentage concentrations. The bottom two rows on
figure 1 are controls.
- Put the test tubes into a temperature-controlled water bath set to 40oC and
leave to sit for 10 minutes for a constant temperature to be reached.
- Add one beetroot piece to each test tubes and begin a 15-minute timer.
 - After your 15 minutes has passed you can now remove the test tubes from
the water bath to cool.
- Label each cuvette with a percentage concentration of ethanol and then
carefully fill it cuvette with its complimentary sample of liquid from each
test tube.
- Use a colourimeter with each cuvette to measure the diffusion of each
sample in AU (arbitrary units).
- Make a table and graph displaying your results and use this to explain the
effect of percentage concentration of ethanol on diffusion of a membrane.

Figure 1.
Volume of Volume of Percent
1moldm-1 water 1moldm-1 ethanol concentration of
(cm3) (cm3) ethanol (%)
100 80 40

100 100 50

100 120 60

100 140 70

100 160 80
100 180 90
0 100 100
100 0 0
Tiago Caldeira