Experiment to study the Effect of a catalyst on the rate of reaction.

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Experiment to study the Effect of a catalyst on the rate of reaction

Hypothesis

The Collision Theory says that the role of a catalyst is to provide the reaction with an extra, alternative pathway for the reaction to occur; the activation energy for this alternative pathway is less than the activation energy for the reaction without the catalyst. As a result, more of the particles have energy greater than the new activation energy, so when they collide, the particles don't just bounce off each other, but the collision leads to reaction and so the rate of reaction increases.

In other words, with the catalyst present, the collisions don't have to be energetic, so more of them will have sufficient energy to lead to reaction. It isn't possible, using simple collision theory to predict quantitatively the exact effect of the catalyst on the rate of reaction, but we can try and predict the effect if changing the total amount of a catalyst used.

Because of this, we know that the more catalyst we use, the faster the reaction rate will be, but we need to make a quantitive prediction. Therefore, I predict that the rate of reaction