Gun Powder Lab Follow-Up Work

Gun Powder Lab Follow-up Work

In this lab we had to isolate several products and discover ways to filter a certain item out. The nitrate salt was contained in a medium sized plastic re-sealable container. In order to isolate the nitrate salt, we first placed some nitrate salt from the container into a large beaker. We than filled that beaker up with hot or warm water. Than we realized that method was taking too long, so we poured the salt nitrate from the beaker back in the plastic container. Afterwards, we filled that entire plastic container up with hot water, and stirred it so all the nitrate would come out of the soil. We than filtered all that water through a filter system we built, into a couple large beakers.

Once those beakers were full we poured it into a large 2 liter bottle, and repeated the process until there was no more calcium nitrate. We kept repeating the process, and when we thought there was no more product left, we used a special strip that detected calcium nitrate, and there was a little left, so we did it a couple of more times. Than we used the strip again, and it was okay to continue the lab.

Our filter system consisted of a paper coffee cup and poked out holes in the bottom of it and then covered the base of the cup with a circular shaped sponge. Then we filled the cup up with soil, and started pouring room temperature water through it in order to filter out the nitrate. That seemed to work well for approximately the first 5 min but the whole in the paper coffee cup started to narrow because the paper would expand when wet , which caused the water to clog inside. So we decided to start using a plastic cup which stopped this problem.

Another part of our experience that we ended up changing was the temperature of our water because we saw that it was easier and faster to extract the nitrate by using hot water, instead of room temperature. After the water coming out through the soil stopped being a cloudy color we stopped pouring the water through the soil, because that meant that all of the nitrate was already extracted from the soil.

We did not observe the concentration process at the microscopic level, but we did at the macroscopic level. The potassium nitrate once concentrated, and weighed first with the water, was than boiled on high until 50% of the water was gone, than we left it overnight, and like magic crystals grew inside the beakers. Which looked like this:

The solubility of potassium nitrate decreases much more rapidly than sodium and calcium nitrate, which is why potassium nitrate is a much more effective choice. Whereas, sodium and calcium nitrate hardly decreases. Adding pure potassium metal to our extract would not have been an effective way to generate potassium nitrate, because the crystals wouldn't turn out correct. It doesn't work in the correct formula. The complete balanced chemical equation for the reaction we used to convert the calcium nitrate into potassium nitrate is:

Ca(No3)2