Wednesday 30 July 2014

Practical Electrochemistry

Today, we made some half-cells and combined them with a salt-bridge and a voltmeter. Then, we were asked to make sense of our observations.





Tuesday 29 July 2014

Standard Electrode Potentials and EMF

This is a big idea and we will spend the rest of the week exploring it:

  1. What are standard electrode potentials?
  2. How are they used to find the EMF of a cell?
  3. What happens if a cell has a negative EMF?
  4. How can EMF be used to predict what would be observed in a redox reaction?
  5. How can standard electrode potentials be used to rank oxidant- and reductant-strength?






Friday 25 July 2014

Electrochemical Cells - Introduction

We started the lesson by making an electrochemical cell using zinc chloride, a zinc electrode, copper (II) sulfate, a copper electrode. We found that this generated about 1.4V




Thursday 24 July 2014

Electrolysis

Electricity can be used to split compounds up into their elements. This is an example of oxidation-reduction.




Wednesday 2 July 2014

Balancing Redox Half Equations

Another recap of Level 2 work...



Thanks to Sam for finding these FLASH CARDS
Logan found these FLASH CARDS which are also excellent.

Tuesday 1 July 2014

Oxidation Numbers

This is just a recap of last year's work. We discussed the allocation of oxidation numbers: