Skip to main content

Bleachy battery building

 This most recent unit was a very short unit for fuel. It lasted no more then a single week.  We learned all about how batteries, electricity, and motors work.  We get to watch our teacher, Will, smash an electric pencil sharpener with a hammer to retrieve the electric motor from inside. With the electric motor we identified each components - stator commutator and rotor. Seeing these components firsthand really helped solidify my understanding. Then using a multimeter we were shown that electricity can flow both ways ways by placing the prongs to the bottom where the battery goes and spinning what is usually the drill piece, we got minimal results with around .2 volts being put out.  Lastly we learned of our action project. To build our very own battery with the electrode and electrolyte of our choice.  I chose bleach and rice wine vinegar for mine and used pennies and some really heavy screws as my electrodes.  Please enjoy my lab report as well as a few pictures of me and G.S. struggling to get a good picture of my voltage output.


Lab report: 

Question:  how effective will bleach work as a electrolyte compared to vinegar


Hypothesis: I think that the bleach will get around .50 volts on the multimeter so the bleach will produce more volts then the vinegar, multimeter



Me putting together my bleach battery.


Materials: Electrodes: 2 metal screws, PENNIES, tin foil.  Electrolytes: vinegar, bleach. Miscellaneous: paper towels, tupperware.

Experiment 1: screws, tin foil, bleach, pennies, tupperware

Experiment 2: screws, pennies, tinfoil, vinegar, tupperware


Construction of experiment: 

 First find a suitable container and pour electrolyte of choice into your container. (electrolyte must be a base, acid or salt) Then put your electrode of choice into your electrolyte (Do not allow your electrodes to touch). Lastly use your multimeter to check voltage output. All done, record your measurements!




observations/data: bleach gave out an entire volt at one point but stayed more around .8 volts




Results: bleach .877 volts vinegar .276 volts

In conclusion My hypothesis was correct, if n slightly off. The bleach surpassed my expectations and even doubled them briefly. It was in fact more effective than vinegar. If we were to add salt to the vinegar would it help even out the playing field?
experiment 1: bleach - 8.77 volts

experiment 2: vinegar - .27 volts









Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Drippy Stats

      This week at my unorthodox, project based high school, GCE lab school, we have finished up with our first Action project of the year for our water class. An action project is a project we complete that can be used to broadcast and show our learning in a unit, this unit we learned about conversions, fractions, and part vs. Percent. These topics were then applied to the real world when we learned about how many around the world do not have easy access to clean water and how this means that many around the world must walk long distances every day to bring home surface water to sustain themselves and their families.  This units action project echo's what we've learned and has provided us an opportunity to teach others about this ongoing tragedy.     to get some perspective on water usage we used a website to calculate approximately how much water we use on a daily basis, I learned that I use about 161 gallons of water daily which I found out is MORE ...

The US vs New Zealand: Push for Rainbow Leadership

     This week (10/22/21) in our humanities class, 'Sustainable Development goals and You'. We learned about Gender Equality and more specifically what gender is. We explored the gay rights movement and the women's suffrage movement. We saw how discrimination for gender or sexual identity badly affects things like safety and access to quality medical treatment. To see this in a different light we took a field experience to Andersonville to meet H-Melt and Molly who are activists for the gay rights movement. Molly created a mural in Andersonville that displayed what an abolitionist feminist world would be like, and H-melt helped as a consultant for Molly's art. This experience gave me a great opportunity to ask questions on Abolitionist Feminism. To put this all together we created a comparative essay to see how different countries are working on gender equality. Eyten, Ted. " Virginia Delegate Danica Roem speaking at the Victory F...

Man's Best Friend

 This unit in our population class we have been working a lot with graphing data based on things like human population which can be recognized as exponential, and using it to calculate future population.  Most of this unit took place in October, so it was only fitting that we took a trip to a cemetery (felt kind of strange/wrong in my opinion) to collect data of death years.  We used this data to examine and predict local life expectancies for different decades to compare.  We talked about how this could represent a geometric sequence and the common ratio which connects to this sequence.  Finally our Action Project was to make a slide show presentation, and video that expresses human population over time compared to an organism of our choice.  We did this so we could see how one might affect the other.  I did my presentation on dogs. Here's the video: Afterword: This project was an interesting way to show off the concept we've been exploring this uni...