Blog Week 31

On Monday, we started out lab. Our lab was seeing what happens when an iron nail is put in a mixture of Copper Chloride and distilled water. We first massed our nail which came out to be 15.8g. Then we massed our distilled water to be 50mL. after that we weighed the plastic container that would hold the Copper Chloride and that came out to be 3.1g; then we added the Copper Chloride and the mass for the Copper Chloride minus the container came to 6.5g. When we poured the solution into a test tube and the test tube was too small, so we had 24mL of the solution was left over. So, our measurements will probably be off. We did observe what happened to the nail once it was in the solution. We noticed that the nail started turning red and the test tube became warm. This is the reaction equation I have so far for this experiment: Fe + CuCl2 = FeCl2 + Cu. On Tuesday, I was absent. On Wednesday, I picked up with the lab. We measured the nail after it soaked in the solution and it weighed 14.5g. Then we weighed the copper by weighing an empty beaker then subtracting that from the beaker holding the copper. The amount of copper was 2.5g.  We also found the amount of iron by subtracting the first nail mass minus the last nail mass and it came to 1.3g. After that we did out calculations to turn the grams into mols. The equation is mass x 1mol/molar mass= mols. So, for Cu we did this: 2.5g x 1mol/63.5g = .0393 mols of Cu. Then we did Fe: 1.3g x 1mol/55.85g = .0232 mols of Fe. We then found the ratio .0393/.0232 = 1.69. Which is close to a 3 to 2 ratio. From here we went wanted to find out if our balanced equation was right. We learned that Fe could have a charge of +2 or +3. And since the ratio is very close to 3 to 2, we decided that in this situatuion Fe had the charge of +3. So, our balanced equation was 3CuCl2 + 2Fe --> 2FeCl3 + 3Cu. On Thursday, we talked about how next week we are doing the silver coke lab! Where we will turn silver+ to a simple silver. We then went on to discuss more about our nail lab. We came to the conclusion the iron had a charge of +3. We then learned that there were mini reactions with in the bigger reaction. They are called coupled reactants and they were these: Cu+2(aq) + 2e- --> Cu(s) and Fe(s) --> Fe3+(aq) + 3e-. (aq) stand for dissolved in water. The first one gains an electron and it's called a reduction. The second one loses an electron and it's called an oxidation. In this reaction is a redox, it's a coupling of a reduction and oxidation together. On Friday, we had an assessment, I'm definitely going to reassess.