Purpose: To better understand saturated solutions, solubility .
Analysis:
2. Why was it necessary to heat the water? Be specific.
Heating the water allows it to hold much more borax in solution than it could at room temperature. So after the water cooled, the ability of the solution to hold the solute inside decreases,this causes the excess borax in the solution to precipitate in crystal form on the string.When the water at a high temperature, water molecules have more kinetic energy, cause it has bigger space in solvent, more room for the solute.
3. Was this a saturated or unsaturated solution? Explain how you know ?
This is a saturated solution, because borax is totally dissolved in the high temperature water at it maximum concentration, so when the temperature cool down, there has the crystal of borax inside the plastic yogurt container, this means at that temperature, the solution does not have enough space for the solute which is borax, so excess borax comes out form the solution then become to crystal.
4.What happened as the solution cooled overnight? Crystals are structures that are formed from a regular repeated pattern of connected atoms, ions or molecules. Explain and draw what is happening at the surface of the crystal as it grew on the pipe cleaner.
There will be white crystal appears in the solution as the solution cooled overnight. Also borax becomes more transparent, because the temperature is cooled down, the solution molecules lost kinetic energy, and the attractive force between solvent molecules increases.
5. What does this lab have to do with solubility ?
Higher temperature will cause higher solubility, when the mass of borax add in the solvent is more than its solubility value at a changeless temperature, the solution will be saturated, and it could not dissolve borax in the solution anymore, except the pressure of the solution changes. This lab is at a constant pressure and it just have the temperature be