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aga
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Noob gets started
Hi All.
New Noo Noob announcement :
I made a fume cupboard and today started with battery acid and copper to make Copper Sulphate (solution) - reaction (#2) happening as i type.
5V works better than 12V so far (no heating or copper Cathode going all bonkers). The 14V flavour was boiling the acid solution out of the jar, and
made the cathode all fluffy (three times the original diameter).
Last night i got the hang of moles and molarity. Thanks Wiki !
Plenty of Stuff on order, but i would appreciate a Pointer from a Guru as to where to look next, as in what to Learn next in this amazing field of
Chemistry.
Loving it lots. Happy days !
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elementcollector1
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Are you doing electroplating? I'm confused.
Anyway, why don't you look into single-displacement, or learn more about the various atomic theories?
Elements Collected:52/87
Latest Acquired: Cl
Next in Line: Nd
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bismuthate
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I personaly love chemguide, it's great for learning chemistry.
http://www.chemguide.co.uk/
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blogfast25
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Welcome!
Can you elaborate on your fume hood, with photos perhaps?
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MrHomeScientist
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The usual rule of thumb for just about any electrolysis experiment is to not go above 6V. Exceeding this tends to erode the electrodes very quickly
and as you saw, it causes excessive heating of the solution!
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aga
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Fume Cupboard
This is my 'work area' which is basically a fume cupboard with a PC fan at the top/back, a water-tight silicone-sealed glass base-tray, and a sliding
front door (top half is fixed+sealed), and an LED lighting strip at the top.
It's based on the IKEA 'Albert' Book Shelving Unit (£13), but i live in Spain, and they only had the metal equivalent, which was 10 euros, so i used
two, but 1 would have been ok.
The shelves i moved around to make a work-height area, and then filled it in with hardboard at the back & sides, then got some glass pieces cut to
make the base-tray and front sliding doors.
It's all sealed with silicone sealant wherever i thought it was needed.
Although small, it works well for me, and fits neatly into a corner my 3m x 2m tin shed (which also has an electronics area, general engineering
section, several model helis and an experimental solar power plant on 1 wall).
The beautiful blue stuff is my CuSO4 product from my very first experiment yesterday. Seems i got carried away, as there's stacks of the stuff !
 
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Steam
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Very nice aga, good to see someone making the investment to have a fume hood!
Does the PC fan vent somewhere, or does it just recirculate the air within the hood?
DISCLAIMER: The information in this post is provided for general informational purposes only and may not reflect the current law in your jurisdiction.
No information contained in this post should be construed as legal advice from the individual author, nor is it intended to be a substitute for legal
counsel on any subject matter. No reader of this post should act or refrain from acting on the basis of any information included in, or accessible
through, this post without seeking the appropriate legal or other professional advice on the particular facts and circumstances at issue from a lawyer
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subsecret
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Even if the fan does exhaust somewhere else, it's still pretty small. I recommend that you invest in a more powerful fan; perhaps you could find an
old furnace blower somewhere. A powerful fan is especially important if you're going to work with more volatile materials (many organic solvents,
etc), poisonous gases, and the like.
Good work, have fun in the lab.
Fear is what you get when caution wasn't enough.
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NeonPulse
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good job. It is great to see people taking an interest in chemistry. You could probably use another fan or two in that unit as a heavy fume producing
reaction will fill that space in no time. some fumes and gasses may also sink to the bottom of the unit making it harder to remove them with one fan.
A bathroom fan would clear that very fast which is what you would want, especially with some of the more harmful fumes and gasses produced in some
reactions. to test how fast it takes to clear just put some baby powder in your hands and clap inside the unit. You should get a pretty good idea of
how efficiently it works.
Another fun and easy project is to make an electric stirrer plate. Cheap, easy to make and they are very useful. After making mine i wondered how i
ever did without it.
So much cheaper than buying one.
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aga
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Thanks for all of the suggestions peeps.
The 'fume cupboard' cost about 60 euros in all, so it wasn't a Huge investment. The main cost was the Glass, which could have been scrounged from
garbage, but i was impatient, plus my glass-cutting skills are non-existent.
I guess adding more PC fans at different heights would be the cheapest way to increase the venting, and having one low down might help with
heavier-than-air fumes (never thought about that when i was building it).
The fan vents thru a tube to the Outside World, and the nearest occupied house is about 400m away.
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aga
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What would be really Great would be if you guys could suggest (in order) what i should learn next, and what experiments to do.
So far is :-
Atomic structure
Mixtures/compounds
Separation
Bonding types
Equations (inc balanced)
Calculating Molarity
Electrolysis
What i *think* i'll learn to do next (depending on your suggestions) is :-
Make/purify the 3 basic acids
Titration (to see what the conc really is)
What i know i'm missing is *why* chem X reacts with chem Y in such a way as to make chems V and W, and also how to determine if that will be
exothermic or not.
Sorry if this way to basic for you guys (i'm starting out with a 31 year old O level in chemistry, and wasn't born all-knowing !)
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blogfast25
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Nice fume cupboard.
Why chemicals react with each other is essentially a matter of changes in Gibbs Free Energy, so it's a good place to start, e.g.:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/chemical/gibbspon...
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Zyklon-A
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Another good place to understand Gibbs Free Energy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPjMPeU5OeM
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blogfast25
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Zb:
Good video, although his 'ball on a slide' is misleading: the total energy is in fact unchanged (potential energy is simply converted a 100 % to
kinetic energy).
Also, the term 'spontaneous' is a misleading term: C + O2 === > CO2 has a Delta G << 0 but coal doesn't 'spontaneously' catch fire.
[Edited on 27-3-2014 by blogfast25]
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DraconicAcid
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Quote: Originally posted by aga  |
What i *think* i'll learn to do next (depending on your suggestions) is :-
Make/purify the 3 basic acids |
I think it would be more interesting to make some acidic acids, actually.
Actually, since you've got copper(II) sulphate, get some ammonia and make the tetrammine complex. It's pretty.
Please remember: "Filtrate" is not a verb.
Write up your lab reports the way your instructor wants them, not the way your ex-instructor wants them.
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aga
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Groovy ! Thanks for the suggestions and links.
I will definitely follow them up tomorrow.
In the meantime, i seem to have about 2 litres of CuSO4 solution, and growing the crystals was a bit boring to watch, so ....
I put 150ml CuSO4 solution in a pyrex jug, added some salt and some aluminium foil.
It fizzed a bit, and went up to 68 degrees for a short time, so i then kept adding aluminium in a very OCD fashion to keep the fizzing happening.
Now i seem to have some of my copper back, and a layer of Purest Brown Sludge which i'll filter and taste, and hopefully call Al2SO3.
Electrolysis seemed easy, so i did it again with just some water, a bit of salt, and copper tube electrodes.
This has made puke green frog spawn. It might be Cu(OH)2, but i'll wait until Summer and see if any tadpoles hatch.
Chemistry is great fun !
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aga
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> some acidic acids
Doh!
Gibbs looks like maths again.
May take me a day or two to get my head around it.
Tetraamminecopper(II) sulfate looks pretty, but given the method to produce it, was it discovered by someone making copper sulphate, getting drunk
every night, repeatedly peeing all over a pile of hay stacked on top of it, then spilling their moonshine whiskey into the mix a few months later ?
[Edited on 27-3-2014 by aga]
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Zyklon-A
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blogfast25 , good point, I didn't notice that.
aga, nice fume-hood, I got a powerful fan at Home Depot for about $15-20, I don't have a fume-hood, but if I did make one that would
be the fan I would use.
I will post a picture of it, and a link (if I can find it,) when I get home. It would be much more powerful than even several computer fans.
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blogfast25
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No serious science without math, I'm afraid.
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aga
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Oh well.
I'd best get my calculator head on then.
I just went back to have a look at the bowl of Purest Brown, and it's all copper-ish.
Maybe i overdid the aluminium. All the blue colour has gone from the solution.
Funny thing - the 'pile' of brown sludge has formed in a hemisphere, rather than just a layer fitting the sides of the jar.
Can't check it's pH yet, as no indicator has arrived yet (i got a load of stuff on order).
I'll buy some red cabbage tomorrow and test it.
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aga
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That reminds me.
I've randomly bought some stuff, in the hope that it'll come in handy.
It takes a week, or maybe two, for anything to arrive in Spain, no matter where it comes from (including Spain) so Distance is no object.
What malarky should a noob like me be buying ?
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Zyklon-A
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Have a look at this thread for some idea's:http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=9890
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aga
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OK. So a -ve delta Gibbs result predicts that a reaction will happen at STP and without external energy input.
So far so good.
The next bit is less easy.
For A +B <-> C= D, delta G = Standard Free Energy Change +2.303 RT log10 etc, then it gets worse, using [C][D] over [A][B].
Sorry to be a complete 'tard, but this is appears as madness, which means that i do not understand the notation, or it's implications.
If A is a Womble and B is a Chestnut, then [A] (i assume) means Womble Concentration (in what units ? moles ?) multiplied by Chestnut concentration.
(Chestnutride of Womble was the required product.)
R and T or RT are unexplained, so unless it's Radio Telegraph, er, what ? Then there's cal and mol, cal and mol of which bit ?
I apologise once again for my total lack of anything, but Maths should really be more explicit.
I knew i should have looked at this tomorrow.
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The_Davster
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Sorry, I have to disagree with the above. Good chemical intuition is far more important than gibbs free energy calculations when deciding if things
will react. The required data for those calculations are not always available. For that, only lots of reading and experience will do. I suggest an
older edition practical organic chemistry book, for example
rushim.ru/books/praktikum/Mann.pdf
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aga
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Random thought :
Are there reactions NOT involving hydrogen and oxygen ?
Is that a distinctly separate branch of chemistry ?
Just that it occurred to me that a water-less world would develop differently, and an environment totally devoid of hydrogen would be different
again.
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