GCSE Chemistry Coursework: Investigating the rate of reaction

Methods

Firstly I will tuck my tie in so that it doesn’t catch anything such as the Bunsen burner flame. Next I would tie my hair back if I had long hair so that doesn’t get my way while doing my experiment. Then put some safety goggles to protect me eyes from acid or any other chemicals that I would be using. Also any stalls that were near me I would tuck under the tables so that I don’t trip or fall over it or so that no other people don’t trip over it. If I didn’t follow any of these safety methods then this could cause people to hurt themselves or end up ruining the experiment-taking place. Therefore after I had done all of this I would heat up the Sodium Thiosulphate in a beaker to the right temperature using a Bunsen burner. I will use many temperatures such as 200c, 300c, 400c , 500c  ,and 600c so that I can get a range of results so that it will make it clearer. Then I will add the Hydrochloric acid. After this I would time this to see how long the reaction took to take place. I will know this when I have placed underneath the beaker a cross on a bit of paper, when this has disappeared from the chemical going cloudy I will know then when to stop the clock. Once I have gathered all my apparatus to do my experiment I would check that the Sodium Thiosulphate was at the right temperature by using a thermometer. I would then measure 30cm of Sodium Thiosulphate and 5cm of Hydrochloric acid and check that just before the experiment. Next I would pour 30cm of Sodium Thiosulphate into the beaker from one of my measuring cylinders and then pour in the 5cm of Hydrochloric acid. Beneath the beaker would be a cross on a piece of paper so that when it disappeared from the reaction that had taken place I would therefore know when to stop the timer. After the timer had stopped I would record the right time into the results table. Next I would make sure my results were reliable by doing the same experiment at one temperature 3 times to check that I would roughly have the same results for each different temperature. I will make sure my results are valid by keeping the following variables the same. For each experiment I would keep the concentration the same so that it would be a fair test. Also I would repeat every experiment 3 times to therefore make this experiment valid. By changing the variable, temperature I will be able to show from my results that I have clearly made good experiments as I will show what temperatures I conducted them at.

Results  

        

This table below will be showing the average rate of the time taken for the reaction to happen and therefore wills show the average time as well.

From these results in this table we can gather that throughout the experiment as the higher the temperature got the slower the rate was. This table represents what happened during the experiment and how fast the rate was, while the temperature was rising during each experiment. This therefore shows that the experiment was successful and fair as I recorded five different experiments to show the variation between the temperatures. I calculated the average time and at what temperature the reaction happened so that I could find an average rate. Overall I believe this table show that my experiment was successful as you can see from the results that I have recorded.