Investigating Factors that Affect the Rate of Reaction Between a Metal and an Acid

Investigating Factors that Affect the Rate of Reaction Between a Metal and an Acid

Factors that may affect the experiment + fair test

The variables that could affect the rate of reaction are the

temperature, amount of magnesium, concentration of acid, surface area

of magnesium and volume of acid. The variable I am going to change is

the concentration of acid. I am going to measure how long it takes a

piece of magnesium(no more than 20m in length) to react in different

concentrations of acid. When magnesium is placed into hydrochloric

acid, it reacts by the acid particles colliding with the magnesium

particles. I am doing the experiment, using the magnesium in ribbon

form. This will give me a good set of results, if I was to use

magnesium powder, the reaction would be over fairly quickly, because

the surface area of magnesium will be a lot greater which will mean,

there will be a lot more collisions that take place between the

magnesium particles and acid particles, in a much smaller amount of

time. The collisions are likely to be more successful if the acid

concentration is stronger, this means there will be more acid

particles to collide with magnesium particles, to give you more chance

of a successful reaction. The variables I am going to keep the same

are the temperature, amount of magnesium, surface area of magnesium

and the volume of acid. By doing all this we will make sure that it is

going to be a fair test.

Preliminary work

We only used magnesium ribbon in sizes 20mm and 10mm, in 20ml of acid

and 10ml of water. Using the stopwatch to time the reaction we found

that: The 20mm piece of magnesium took 40.16 seconds to fully react in

the acid, and the 10mm piece of magnesium took 35.84 seconds to

dissolve in the acid. In out main experiment we are going to choose a

15mm piece of magnesium with acid. The experiment will be repeated

three times to make sure our results are accurate.