October 27/09 Chemistry 11

Today in chemistry 11 we did a lab, to determine the ratio of moles of copper produced to moles of iron consumed during the chemical reaction between Iron and Copper (II) Chloride.



The procedure for the lab is :

1)Weigh your empty 100ml beaker and record its mass.
2)Add around 8g of copper(II) chloride to the beaker and record its mass
3)Add 50ml of distilled water to the beaker and stir until the copper(II) chloride dissolves
4)Get two nails that are clean and dry record the two nails masses and record it
5)Put the nails in your beaker that contains the copper(II) chloride for 20 minutes you should start to see copper form at the bottom of your beaker
6)Use the tongs to pick up each nail and then use the scupula to scrape off the remaining copper on the nails into the beaker
7)Dry the nails in the drying oven and record its mass once its dry
8)Decant the liquid from the solid, pour the liquid into another beaker (just in case you lose some of the copper you can still retrieve it from the other beaker)
9)Rinse the solid with 25ml of distilled water then decant again into the beaker you decanted into before
10)Wash the copper with with 25ml of hydrochloric acid then decant the hydrochloric acid and was the copper with 25ml of distilled water decant again after
11)Put your beaker with the copper in it in the drying oven to dry
12)Let the copper with the beaker dry and record the mass of the beaker with the copper in it
13)Wash your hands clean up your lab station put away your materials and lab aprons and safety goggles

After that we recorded our information:

Empty beaker: 92.5g
Beaker with copper (II) chloride: 97.67
Nails: 5.54
Nails after the solution: 5.2
Beaker with copper: 94.24

After we managed to determine the amount of iron used which was .34 and amount of copper produced which was 1.74

We ended up with a ratio of 3:1 the correct answer was 3:2 we had a 20% percentage error.
Some errors where we went wrong in the lab was we did not let our materials completely dry before weighing them and we also did not let our nails sit for the full amount of time in our solutions.