What affects the rate of reaction between a metal and an acid?

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Lewis Jones

What affects the rate of reaction between a metal and an acid?

Factors that may affect the experiment + fair test

The variables that could affect the rate of reaction are the temperature, amount of magnesium, concentration of acid, surface area of magnesium and volume of acid. The variable I am going to change is the concentration of acid. I am going to measure how long it takes a piece of magnesium(no more than 20m in length) to react in different concentrations of acid. When magnesium is placed into hydrochloric acid, it reacts by the acid particles colliding with the magnesium particles. I am doing the experiment, using the magnesium in ribbon form. This will give me a good set of results, if I was to use magnesium powder, the reaction would be over fairly quickly, because the surface area of magnesium will be a lot greater which will mean, there will be a lot more collisions that take place between the magnesium particles and acid particles, in a much smaller amount of time. The collisions are likely to be more successful if the acid concentration is stronger, this means there will be more acid particles to collide with magnesium particles, to give you more chance of a successful reaction. The variables I am going to keep the same are the temperature, amount of magnesium, surface area of magnesium and the volume of acid. By doing all this we will make sure that it is going to be a fair test.

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Preliminary work

We only used magnesium ribbon in sizes 20mm and 10mm, in 20ml of acid and 10ml of water. Using the stopwatch to time the reaction we found that: The 20mm piece of magnesium took 40.16 seconds to fully react in the acid, and the 10mm piece of magnesium took 35.84 seconds to dissolve in the acid. In out main experiment we are going to choose a 15mm piece of magnesium with acid. The experiment will be repeated three times to make sure our results are accurate. We have also done 20mm and 10mm of magnesium in 10ml ...

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