Chemistry and washing. Fun chemistry experience at home

ENTERTAINING EXPERIENCES AT HOME
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Chemistry and washing. Chemical experiments

Entertaining experiments in chemistry

Entertaining experiences at home / Chemistry experiments for children

After reading the headline, you will probably be indignant: "I am a chemist, not a laundress!" What could be interesting for a laundry chemist? However, when you do these experiments, you will see for yourself that washing is one of the most interesting chemical processes.

Take some chalk or dry and clean eggshells. Grind the shell and chalk into powder, and then pour into a test tube.

Pour in the same 10% vinegar. The contents in the tube will begin to sizzle and foam. Check what gas is released during the reaction. As soon as the contents of the test tube begin to hiss and foam strongly, take a match and bring it into the test tube. Has the flame gone out? That's the way it should be. After all, chalk and eggshells consist of the same substance - calcium carbonate, which dissolves in vinegar. The carbon dioxide released during this does not support combustion, the match goes out.

For the next experiment, you will need a calcium compound well dissolved in water, and such a compound is formed by dissolving calcium carbonate in acetic acid. Water will also be an important substance in this experiment: after all, you are investigating the process of washing, and there is no washing without water.

Water is different. It is essential for you that it can be "hard" or "soft". We call hard water, which contains a lot of dissolved calcium compounds, and soft water, where there are few or none at all.

We will also need an aqueous solution of soap. It is easy to obtain by dissolving, for example, soap shavings in a bottle of hot water. If they are not at home, do it yourself from a bar of laundry soap.

Start your first experience. Pour half of the water into a clean test tube and add 8-10 drops of a soapy solution. Close the mouth of the test tube with your finger and shake it several times. Foam appeared in the test tube. Now pour 4-6 drops of the liquid obtained as a result of the reaction of chalk with vinegar into a test tube with soap foam. To your surprise, the foam in the tube will disappear, and a white coagulating precipitate will begin to separate from the soapy water. This is the number one enemy of washing and washing.

But what if the experiment is carried out differently? Let's try. Pour a few drops of the liquid obtained as a result of the reaction of chalk with vinegar into a test tube with water, and only then add a little soap solution. Although the order of operations in our experience has changed slightly, the result will be the same. After shaking, the same enemy, a white coagulated precipitate, will reappear in the test tube. This precipitate is always formed when soap meets a calcium compound in water. Soap foam will not appear until the precipitate is completely separated, that is, until the liquid obtained as a result of the reaction of chalk with vinegar combines with soap.

You can conclude: calcium compounds are "real soap thieves." They don't just steal soap. The resulting white precipitate is deposited on fibrous tissues and destroys them. You will be interested to know: experiments have shown that after 50 washes in hard water, the strength of linen fabric decreased by 25%, and cotton by 45% - more than after washing (also 50 times) in soft water.

What to do with hard water? After all, you still need to wash it! Chemistry comes to the rescue. Let's do one more experiment. Pour up to half of the water into the test tube and add a few drops of the solution that we got at the very beginning from chalk and vinegar. Pour half a spoonful of soda here, shake the test tube properly, closing it tightly with your finger. After a while, the liquid will become transparent, and a small sediment will be visible at the bottom. Pour the clear liquid carefully into another test tube, add a few drops of soap solution to it and shake. Foam will appear in the test tube. This means that the soda helped: the calcium compounds disappeared. They stood out in the form of a fine sediment, which settled to the bottom of the first test tube. Hence the conclusion - to soften water, you should always use soda. Of course, there are even better methods of dealing with the "thief" of soap.

Drop 10 drops of a solution of chalk and vinegar into a test tube with water. You will get clear water, which contains a lot of calcium compounds. Take some kind of liquid detergent and pour 8-10 drops of soap solution into a test tube with hard water. Shaking the test tube, you will see that it still turned out to be a pretty good foam.

Synthetic detergents are not afraid of hard water. Now you see that chemists are not neglecting the issues of washing, but are fighting the "thief" of soap.

A large amount of animal and vegetable fats are used to make soap, which must be saved. Now chemists have learned how to make detergents from oil and coal. They are cheaper than soap and easier to use.

Convinced of the huge role chemistry plays in washing?

Author: Shkurko D.I.

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Surprise encourages exploration 09.04.2015

Philosophers say that knowledge of the world begins with wonder. Does this mean, speaking in a more mundane language, that the effectiveness of learning will be higher if the objects around us begin to behave differently than they should? Indeed, it is, and surprise helps to learn and explore the world, starting from a very early age, when a person has not yet mastered speech.

Psychologists from Johns Hopkins University conducted several experiments with 11-month-old children in which children had to observe the behavior of ordinary toys (balls, cars, etc.). But only in one case, the behavior of objects was consistent with the usual physics, and in the other, objects suddenly began to behave in a completely incomprehensible way. For example, a toy car rolling down a toy hill towards some kind of obstacle did not rest against it, but passed through.

In an article in Science, the authors write that when faced with an unusual situation, children better remembered the properties of the object. That is, a car that just drove down a hill was less lingering in memory than a car that went through a wall. Moreover, the strange behavior of the object encouraged the children to actively explore it: for example, they began to beat the same typewriter on the table, as if testing its strength and hardness. If the object suddenly hung in the air, instead of falling, as it should be, then the child also began to test it, dropping it from a height.

It can be said that the children behaved like scientists, trying to reproduce the strange properties of the object that they had observed before. And even new toys that the child had not yet seen aroused less interest than an incomprehensible situation.

It is known that a person from an early age has a certain minimum of necessary knowledge about the world around him. So, a few years ago, an article was published in the journal WIREs Cognitive Science, which stated that babies can operate with elementary physics. For example, two-month-old babies understand that an unsecured object can fall, and an object that has disappeared from view still continues to exist somewhere; by five months, they have an understanding of the differences between solids and loose or fluid substances; and ten-month-olds are aware of the difference between "less" and "more" (although "less" and "more" are categories more logical-mathematical than physical). It is obvious that such knowledge does not remain in the head as a passive load, but is actively used - what the child sees around him, he checks with the usual rules.

It is also surprising that surprise (sorry for the tautology) encourages even such young children, who are not yet a year old and who have not yet learned to speak, to actively explore the world around them. One can only regret that in many adults this property of the psyche disappears somewhere without a trace.

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