Testing for ions.

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Testing for ions.

Introduction.

A body is found in the sea, but the forensic scientist is suspicious and thinks that the murder took place elsewhere and the person has been dumped in the sea. Other possibilities include being drowned in a bath or a local fresh water lake next to a copper mine.

Purpose of activity.

The purpose of the activity is to find out where the person was first killed by doing tests on different types of water, which she could have died from. By doing this, we should be able to find ions in the person’s lung and in the different types of water to help us in our experiment

Planning.

The first thing to do is to test the water in the person’s lungs to see what ions we would get, then test the water from the place where she was found and a place where she could have got killed to see what ions we would get, after getting all of the results from the different waters we would have to match the ions we have got from the lungs with the different waters while matching up the different the waters the one that don’t match would get eliminated until we get a perfect match.

There were 3 different types of water’s we had to test for and they were –

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  • Seawater – Na+, K+, Ca2+, Cl-, So42-, Co32-
  • Lake water – Ca2+, Cu-, Cl- 
  • Bath water – Na+, Co32-

Safety points.

There were a few safety points that we had to be careful with so that the experiment would go right and that no one would get hurt.

  1. Making sure that we wore goggles when doing the experiments.
  2. Working with reactive chemicals.
  3. Making sure that we don’t get the chemicals onto us.
  4. Making sure that when we were using the wire loop we had to clean ...

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