After iron and aluminium, copper is probably the third most important industrial metal. It is used in electrical wiring and for printed circuit boards (PCB). The board is completely coated in copper then copper is etched away to leave the path that the electricity needs to follow. Copper is also used for plumbing although it is …
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Category:Chemistry
Conservation Of Mass…
When a chemical reaction occurs, mass/matter is conserved. This means that the reactants and the products have the same mass. No new atoms are created during the reaction and no atoms are destroyed; they are just rearranged. The following short video attempts to illustrate this principle and although it contains a rather big mistake, it …
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What Have The Romans Ever Done For Us…
Work done by Dr Nikola Koepke (formerly from Oxford University but now at Zurich Universtory) looked at the remains of skeletons from the 8th century BC until the 18th century AD and used changes in people’s heights over this period as a measure of how well fed they were. The study combined biology and archaeology …
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Sacrificial Protection…
Steel is an alloy of iron containing other elements to improve its physical properties. Mild steel is iron with about 0.25% carbon added; stainless steel is iron with chromium and nickel added to reduce rusting. Iron will rust whenever it comes into contact with both water and oxygen. If you can stop one of those …
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Blast Furnace…
Iron is extracted from its ore (rocks rich in iron oxide) in a blast furnace. The iron ore is mixed with coke (a refined form of coal with a very high carbon content) and limestone. This mixture is baked into a crusty mixture known as sinter (that has a very high surface area) before being …
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Rusty Hinge…
Iron, even in the form of steel, is prone to rust. This is a slow reaction that takes place when the iron is in contact with both water and oxygen. It is quite easy to show that water and oxygen are both needed for rusting by setting up a simple controlled experiment. Things you need …
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Gold Part Two…
[This is follow up to Gold Part One.] A pupil asked… Will the earth naturally produce more gold for us to extract? How long will this take? How long is the half-life of gold and what does it decompose into? Would it be possible to industrially produce gold from different atoms? A. Pupil Esq. When …
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Words, Words, Words (Chem. Ed.)…
I thought it might be good to have a page with definitions for some commonly used words in science. This post will be largely chemistry based; I have done biology and physics versions too. I apologise in advance if it is too simple for you – just make sure that you really do understand each …
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Phase Transition…
. The graph shows how the temperature (in this case of some ice) changes over time when left out on a laboratory bench at 20 °C. The ice changes from being in a solid state to a liquid state. This change of state is a phase transition. There are five distinct regions of the graph …
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Fractional Distillation…
Fractional distillation is the process used to separate the many liquid components of crude oil; and nitrogen, oxygen and argon from liquid air. Simple distillation in the laboratory can also be adapted to separate mixtures of miscible liquids.