One of my friends who come along
to my science groups back in 2012, asked me if we could do some experiments on
heating materials. She said she had
tried heating a copper coin and couldn’t get it to spark green and didn’t know
why. Well, this is why it didn't produce that green flame...
If you heat a modern copper coin
it will go black, no green flame. This
is because you have formed copper oxide; the black formed during the heating of the coin in flame is the copper oxide.
Then I was left with the
question: how could I make a green flame using copper? How I did this was not using a copper coin But I did use copper sulphate.
Using a spoon and an alcohol burner I heated it and voila green
flames! Fab. Be sure that you’re in a ventilated area when
you do this.
What else can we do with Copper
sulphate? We could put an iron nail in it. What happens? The liquid turns from blue to green.
When an iron nail is placed in a copper sulphate solution, iron displaces copper from copper sulphate solution forming iron sulphate, which is green in colour.
Therefore, the blue colour of copper sulphate solution fades and green colour appears.
When we take an iron metal nail and dip it into a blue solution of copper (II) sulphate, firstly it changes the solution to iron sulphate which is green in colour. If you leave it the nail becomes covered with a reddish substance. This reddish substance is metallic copper. The equation for this is:
Fe(s) + CuSO4(aq) -> FeSO4(aq)
+ Cu(s)
This is what is known as a redox reaction, or otherwise known as a oxidation reduction reaction.This post was first written 11/07/2012 revised: 11/02/2016
We had great fun creating loads of different colour flames and sparks when we made gunpowder. Different chemicals give different colours:
ReplyDeleteRed Strontium Chloride or Strontium Nitrate
Orange Calcium Chloride
Yellow Sodium Chloride (table salt) or Borax
Green Copper Sulfate or Boric Acid
Blue Copper Chloride
Purple Potassium Chloride
White Magnesium Sulfate (Epsom salts)
Girls want to make fireworks next, think we'll start with sparklers...
We've done a few of them on Monday and yes iron filings are fun - Chiara wants to do a video of heating iron filings soon, they were a big hit at Monday group too. You know I'm going to have to look into making sparklers now! That sounds like too much fun to miss! Thank you x
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