Mixtures & Solutions

Engineers use their knowledge of mixtures and solutions to solve problems in industrial, commercial and environmental settings. 

They design ways to clean oil spills, create new medicine and provide clean drinking water.

Matter, any substance that takes up space and has volume, exists everywhere around us in the form of solids, liquids and gases.

When we combine two or more types of matter, we end up with mixtures and solutions. We interact with mixtures and solutions all the time in our everyday lives from the air we breathe, the food and drinks we consume and the surfaces we walk on.

• A mixture is made by physically combining any combination of solids, liquids or gases without changing the chemical composition of the individual matter components. They can be separated using mechanical, screening or filtering processes.
• • A homogeneous mixture has the same uniform appearance and composition throughout its mass, like milk, blood or glue.
  • A heterogeneous mixture consists of visibly different substances or phases. A heterogeneous mixture does not have a uniform composition throughout its mass. Heterogeneous mixtures include concrete, sand and even chocolate chip cookies!

• A solution is a unique type of homogeneous mixture where one of the substances dissolves in the other like salt or sugar dissolving in water.

Most engineering design problems involve the selection of materials to create a product, and these could include mixtures or solutions. It is important for scientists and engineers to study material properties in order to understand, and sometimes redesign, the structure of a given substance.

Environmental engineers use mixtures to learn how to separate oil from water in oil spills. Chemical and petroleum engineers employ separation steps based on the properties of mixtures and solutions when making gasoline from crude oil. Water resource engineers study mixtures and solutions in order to get sand, salt and chemicals out of water so it can be used for drinking and other purposes. And, biomedical engineers even use mixtures and solutions to develop new medicines.