Crystals Lab

In my opinion, this is the funnest lab that we have done all year.  This lab was all about solutions and having the proper about of saturation into the solution. Basically it was a trial and error lab.  You had to find out that it was the best thing to just stuff as much of the Aluminum Potassium Sulfate in the water as it would hold.  This would produce crystals too fast, and would just glue them to the beaker and not be able to pull them out.  It was a patients lab, because the slower it produced crystals the more controlled it would grow them.  The first day we learned the hard way, and stuffed the powered into the water, until it could hold no more.  Like I said, this was the wrong thing to do.  When we got back the next day, the crystals were uncontrolled and just glued all over the beaker.  There was nothing that we could do but learn from our mistake and start over.  This time we used much less powder and didn't saturate the water the that extent.  The following day, we found out that our attempt was a success.  We had produced a very large crystal, that was very colorful and neat.  This experiment was like every other one in some ways.  It sometimes takes a screw up to realize that the direction you went was totally wrong, and that you need to just do it over.

PH lab

This is another lab used to measure solutions.  This lab is to show you how mixing two solutions together will eventually level the PH out.  We started with a acid, and then mixed in sodium hydroxide for a base.  What you had to find out is how much base it took to make the acid a neutral.  The graph demonstrates how the PH reacted as we added a base to the acid.  The way it worked, is we had a beaker with 10 ml of acid.  Then we put a magnetic strip in the bottom to stir on the stir plate.  Above the beaker, there was a test tube with the sodium base in it.  At the bottom of the graph it shows how much of the base is into the solution in the beaker and the side shows what the PH level was at that point.  The point of this lab is to show you that all acids are capable of being diluted to be a base.

Beer's Law Lab

The graph above demonstrates the  numbers that we found through the lab.  The line shows how saturated the liquid was.  The more light that is absorbed shows that the liquid is more saturated.  If you look up to the graph the dot that is labeled .218 is a solution we mixed up.  With this solution we had to find out how saturated the water was with the nickel solution.  Using the color remitter we found out how much light was absorbed and what the concentration was.  Then using a line of best fit to the other solutions that we knew what the concentration was we place the dot on the graph.  This lab has helped me to understand how to tell and what the difference of a saturated solution is.