Adsorption. Fun chemistry experience at home

ENTERTAINING EXPERIENCES AT HOME
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Adsorption. Chemical experiments

Entertaining experiments in chemistry

Entertaining experiences at home / Chemistry experiments for children

Everyone is probably familiar with the physicochemical phenomenon that will be discussed now, although, perhaps, not everyone knows that it is called adsorption. Even if you did not go through adsorption in the classroom, you have observed it more than once. As soon as you plant an ink blot on paper or, much worse, on clothes, you immediately get acquainted with this phenomenon. When the surface of one substance (paper, cloth, etc.) absorbs particles of another substance (ink, etc.), this is adsorption.

Very good adsorbent - coal. And not stone, but woody, and not just woody, but active (activated). Such coal is sold in pharmacies, usually in the form of tablets. We will begin experiments on adsorption with it.

Prepare a pale ink solution of any color and pour into a test tube, but not to the top. Put a tablet of activated charcoal, preferably crushed, into a test tube, close with your finger and shake well. The solution will brighten before your eyes. Change the solution to some other, but also colored one - let it be diluted gouache or watercolor. The effect will be the same. And if you just take pieces of charcoal, they will absorb the dye much weaker.

There is nothing strange in this: activated carbon differs from ordinary carbon in that it has a much larger surface. Its particles are literally permeated with pores (for this, coal is processed in a special way and removed from its impurities). And since adsorption is absorption by the surface, it is clear: the larger the surface, the better the absorption. Adsorbents are able to absorb substances not only from solutions. Take a half-liter glass jar and put one drop of cologne or any other odorous substance on the bottom. Grab the jar with your palms and hold it like that for half a minute to heat the odorous liquid a little - then it will evaporate faster and smell stronger. As is customary in chemistry, do not sniff the substance directly from the bottle, but with a slight wave of the hand direct the air along with the vapors of the substance to the nose; it is not always known whether the substance in the bottle smells good.

Whatever the smell, you will certainly feel it clearly. Now put some activated charcoal in the bottle, close it tightly with a lid and leave it for a few minutes. Remove the lid and again direct the air towards you with a wave of your palm. The smell is gone. It was absorbed by the adsorbent, or, more precisely, the molecules of the volatile substance that you placed in the jar were absorbed.

It is not necessary to take active carbon for these experiments. There are many other substances that can serve as adsorbents: tuff, dry ground clay, chalk, blotting paper. In a word, a variety of substances, but always with a developed surface. Including some food products - you probably know how easily bread absorbs odors. It is not for nothing that wheat bread is not advised to be kept in the same package with rye bread - their smells are mixed, and each one loses its special, unique aroma.

A very good adsorbent is puffed corn, or corn sticks, so loved by many of us. Of course, it makes no sense to spend a package or even a quarter of a package on experience, but a few pieces ... Let's try. Repeat the previous experiment with odorous substances in the presence of corn sticks - and the smell will completely disappear. Of course, after the experience, it is no longer possible to eat sticks.

Let's return to the experiment with the production of carbon dioxide (carbon dioxide). Fill two test tubes with this gas, put corn sticks in one and shake several times. Then, as before, do the experiment with lime water (you can simply "pour" gas from test tubes into it - it is heavier than air). Will there be a difference in the behavior of lime water? Yes, it will. The liquid will become cloudy only in the glass into which the gas, which has not been treated with an adsorbent, has been “poured”. And from another test tube, the one where there were corn sticks, carbon dioxide cannot be extracted: it was absorbed by the adsorbent.

If you work in a chemistry circle and have already learned how to obtain and collect such colored gases as chlorine and nitric oxide (you don’t need to deal with them at home, good traction is required here), then you can test the effect of coal and corn sticks on them. Place an adsorbent into a vessel with a colored gas, shake it several times - and the color, if it does not disappear completely, will noticeably weaken.

Now in many kitchens, a variety of devices are placed above gas stoves to clean the air from fumes and smoke. In such devices, among other things, there is a cartridge with some kind of adsorbent through which polluted air is driven. What happens in this case, you now know. And when the entire surface is occupied by foreign particles “absorbed” from the air, the cartridge is replaced with a fresh one.

Author: Olgin O.M.

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