Bleach Experiment

Bleach can be used to remove color from another substance or clean the water that we, humans, drink everyday. Even though bleach is very helpful and commonly used in our environment, it is also very reactive and unstable if it is not used correctly. For my experiment, I will be making an electronic device that will function as a colorimeter. Using the colorimeter, I will measure the concentration of blue dye in sports drinks, and find the rate at which blue dye disappears when it is mixed with bleach in different concentrations of dyes. The research question of this project is: “How does the amount of bleach mixed into a blue dye solution, affect the total amount of time for different concentrations of blue dye to disappear?” Other people may have done this project before me, but none of them have been reported.

If a substance has color, then you can determine its concentration by light absorption which is when light is being taken up by an object or spectrum. The Beer-Lambert Law is commonly used to find the absorbance (A) of light in a solution by multiplying the molar absorption coefficient ( ε ) ( how well a chemical absorbs light at a given wavelength ), the concentration ( C ) and the path of the light through the sample solution ( l ). The equation for this relationship is “ A=εCl ”. The color of the solution is determined by the color of light the molecules do not absorb, so, say if you had a blue colored solution, then the color of light will be orange. This is because the highest molar absorption coefficient for blue dye falls around 620 nanometer which is the orange part of the visible electromagnetic spectrum.

The molar absorption coefficient can be found in an absorption spectrum. The absorption spectra is generate...

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...is for this experiment is: “If you increase the amount of drops of bleach mixed into a blue dye solution, then the total amount of time for the blue dye in the solution to disappear will decrease.” In other words, I think that the blue dye in the solution will disappear faster when you increase the amount of bleach. The research that I gathered helped me understand better of why and how I am going to do my experiments in the way I am doing them. It also supports my hypothesis. It supports my hypothesis because I found out that there is an active ingredient in bleach known as the hypochlorite molecule. This molecule helps break the bonds in pigment molecules so I think that the more bleach used, the faster the bonds will break apart. In this experiment, I will be finding out how much dye are mixed in sports drinks and what is the reaction rate of bleach and blue dye.