Oil And Water Drop Experiment Essay

My experiment was to find out how the type of liquid can affect the amount of drops that can fit on a penny. I used 3 liquids to test my question and they were water, rubbing alcohol, and vegetable oil. I discovered that water could hold the most drops and vegetable oil and rubbing alcohol could hold about the same amount of drops. My hypothesis was if I use water then it will hold more drops than vegetable oil. My hypothesis was supported by my data. The average number of drops for water was 93 whereas the average for vegetable oil was only 36. Obviously water held more as the data shows that not one group had more vegetable oil drops then water drops. There really wasn’t any huge mistakes made. We did everything the right way and made sure to drop from an inch up and use vegetable oil last. One minor mistake we may have made was that while I was dropping the liquid onto the penny the table was being knocked and pushed a little. I don’t think it would be necessary to redo the data because of this but it could have made a difference. A fancier tool could have been a penny cleaner/dryer. This would be helpful to make sure the pennies are all the same. That would have created better data.
Cohesion is the attractive force among H2O molecules. They cling to each other and hold on. Not only does water have that property it also has Adhesion. That is the attractive force between H2O molecules and other substances. The water clings to other things. Given both these properties water can cling to a penny a lot better than other liquids. The penny couldn’t hold as many vegetable oil drops because the oil doesn’t have very good cohesion properties. If the oil can’t stick together then it will slide off easily. Rubbing alcohol also doesn’t have the strongest properties so it slides off easier