Dry Ice

In chemistry we did an experiment with dry ice. Dry ice is very cold and made of Carbon Dioxide. Because it’s so cold it burns you if you touch it. The difference between dry ice and regular ice is if you add regular ice to water it eventually turns to a liquid, when you add dry ice to water it skips a stage and goes straight to gas. When a solid can go from a solid straight to a gas it’s called Sublimation. First, we had to put 150 mL into our calorimeter and take the temperature of the water then go get our chuck of dry ice from our teacher. After we took the mass of our piece of dry ice when took it to our calorimeter and placed it into the water.

If you watched carefully and blew the smoke away every once in  a while you would see as the ice was subliming it created white bubbles on top of the water and if you were to touch the bubble or let it burst on its own the gas would come out.

The gas would then spill over the sides. As you watched the smoke go over the sides of the calorimeter it reminded me of the fog they have that comes out in the fog machines people use for Halloween.

Stirring the ice in the water helped it sublime faster. Even though the solution created smoke, the smoke was fairly cold. To verify it was cold there was a drop in the temperature of the water. If you were to compare how much energy it takes to separate the particles when a substance is subliming to how much energy it take in melting/ fusing. It takes 333 J/g to melt ice compared to 640 J/g to takes to see ice sublime. From this lab I learned there was a thing as sublimation.

This was my favorite picture 😊.