Adi loves the smell of lavender, so she decides to press a few petals of the flower until they release a few drops of oil. She w
ants to determine the molecular weight of the oily substance to try to identify the fragrance she likes so much. Her lab instructor tells her that her experiment will not work. Why do you think it will not work?
What Adi failed to realize is that the oily substance that was obtained from lavender consists of a mixture of substances. It is not only the required fragrance that is present in the extract.
This experiment will not work because those other components in the mixture may be erroneously identified when they show up in the mass spectrum of the extract and may be mistaken for the fragrance in question.
Hence the experiment will not work because; if some kind of separation method is not used to identify other impurities in the oil, many other substances may be mistaken for the actual fragrance.
