Chem Class - October 28, 2009

Today in class we did the ‘Mole Ratio Lab Experiment’. It wasn’t too hard, but it took a while. It was a simple experiment but if you didn’t pay attention to how you were handling the chemicals you could have gotten hurt. The purpose was to the determine the number of moles of copper produced in the reaction of iron and copper (II) chloride, the number of moles of iron used up in the reactio of iron and copper (II) chloride, the ratio of moles of iron to moles of copper, and the number of atoms and formula units involved in the reaction.



When doing the experiment you had to be careful with the chemicals. Copper (II) Chloride and 1Mhydrochloric acid.

Copper (II) Chloride                            1 Mhydrocholirc acid

If you came in contact with either of them you would have to rinse the affected area with water. The chemicals should never be touched, tasted, consumed and inhaled directly in any way! We wore our safety goggles and lab aprons.

The main point of the experiment was to find the difference of ratio of moles of Iron to copper. We mixed the Copper (II) Chloride with distilled water, and it turned into a light blue color.

 Copper (II) Chloride mixed with distilled water

After that we added two Iron nails and waited 20 minutes for the results.

After waiting 20 minutes we took out the nails from the solution and examined them. We saw that they were covered in copper. We then scrapped off the copped back into the solution then placed the nails to dry.

We then separated the Copper (II) Chloride solution and the leftover copper, then rinsed the left over copper with 1Mhydrochloric acid. We dried the left over copper and weighed the nail and dry copper. After recording out results we dumped the left over chemicals in a chemical container that would be disposed of later on and cleaned up our lab materials. Then we washed our hands.

You can find the lab on page 55 of the Heath Chemistry (Laboratory Experiments-Canadian Edition) text book. Give it a go yourself!