Overall, I really enjoyed how chemistry was pretty stress free with in-school projects only. I liked that we were given different choices of the projects we did instead of having a bunch of projects that were all mandatory that aren't as interesting to us.
During this class throughout the semester, the thing I honestly learned about myself is that I only do the minimum amount of work needed to get an A. For example in chemistry we had three different sections and for each section we had to get a certain amount of points. I found that a lot of my classmates were doing lots of different projects which made them get a lot more points than what was initially needed, but I did only a few projects to get just enough points for an A. Something I did in this class that was done out of my own curiosity was when I made my own lotion. I wanted to learn about how and why it works, and actually made some myself. I ended up doing it twice because the first time I did it, it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to and I wanted to be able to get it right. A time in this class when I did something only because I had to and not because I was curious was when we made our rockets. I wasn't very interested in that type of project but that was one of the few things we actually had to do, so I did it. It didn't turn out as bad as I thought it would be, but it still wasn't something I am truly interested in. I liked the way this class was structured. I think that more of our classes should have this opportunity of choice in the projects we do and find something we are curious about and experiment with it.
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We used a simple recipe for this experiment using coconut oil, aloe vera gel, and essential oils. (We used tea tree essential oil). We made the lotion by getting a little bit of coconut oil and whipping it up for about 5 minutes in a bowl to make it more soft and smoothe. Once it was whipped, we added some aloe vera gel that we mixed in and a few drops of tea tree essential oil to make it smell good.
Watch the video below of our rocket launch!
Our group! Building The RocketThe first thing we did for our rocket was make the body. For this, we had Andrew cut out 4 strips of paper that were really long and skinny. Each piece of paper was going to be a new layer on our rocket body so we chose to make ours 4 layers so it would be sturdy enough not to break. Once we had the four pieces of paper, we put glue over every piece except for the first one and twisted them around a PVC pipe to get the shape of a tube.
We also researched about an end burner and learned that the flame actually spreads in a straight line from front to back. Since it burns straight like this, it means it burns really quickly. After ignition, the flame shapes like a dome and creates high pressure and thrust. Potassium nitrate is made of three chemical elements which are potassium, nitrogen, and oxygen. Those three elements act as an oxidizer. In order to work, they all need to be pure because if they aren't, it might not work the way we want it to . Black powder is made of potassium nitrate, carbon, and sulfur. When mixed together really well, those ingredients burn nicely and release gas and smoke. The sulfur and carbon mixed together are used as the fuel, and the potassium nitrate is use as the oxidizer. Black powder has a fast burn rate which makes it really good for an end burner but also works as a core burner which is what our group decided to use for our rocket. Above is a video of our final test motor. For this motor, we tested it to see how much thrust we would get. We found that our motor had a maximum thrust of 4,248 .1 and had a burn time of 1 .1 seconds. We also calculated total impulse and average thrust. To calculate the total impulse we first added the sum of all of our thrust values from our test and multiplied this number by .1 seconds. This gives us a gram · second and our final value needs to be in newtons · seconds, therefore to get this number I divided the gram · second value by 102. The total impulse calculated for our motor is 12 .6 newton's · seconds. Next we found the average thrust of our motor by dividing the total impulse (12 .6 N · s) by the burn time (1 .1 seconds). Our total average thrust is 11 .5 N · s. We plugged in our average thrust, rocket mass, burn time and rocket body radius to find the cross sectional area, motor mass, motor dry mass and rocket peak altitude prediction (which you can see below).
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CHEMISTRY blogFeel free to take a look around my blog. You can find all of my work from my 10th grade chemistry class and see what I have learned.
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