Question
Terror in the Toilet Bowl Part 1 You really had meant well. After all, how many of your friends, going home for the weekend to
Terror in the Toilet Bowl
Part 1
You really had meant well. After all, how many of your friends, going home for the weekend to
catch up on good food and clean laundry, would even have considered offering to take over their
kid sister's job of cleaning the bathroom? (The fact that she saw you replacing the smashed
taillight on your folks' car at 3am had nothing to do with it.) No, out of the goodness of your
heart, you volunteered to leave no tile unscrubbed - and what do you get? Yelled at for releasing
a cloud of toxic fumes that drove everyone from the house for half a freezing day, until things
aired out. How were you to know that your folks had switched toilet bowl cleaners? The old stuff
never did anything like that when you mixed it with the Clorox. To top it off, your folks blamed
you for not knowing better: "Why am I paying tuition for you to take a chemistry course that
doesn't teach you anything practical?! When you get back to campus, go ask that teacher to tell
you what happened - at least you'll learn something that way!"
"Hydrazine!", announced your chem prof on Monday after you had related the whole sordid tale.
"Well-known process, really - mix together some ammonia, hypochlorite, and base, and - boom!
Toxic rocket fuel that reeks of dead fish! Funny thing, though - even after all this time people
still aren't too sure of the actual mechanism of hydrazine formation. Listen - how would you like
to try to figure this out, instead of doing the regular kinetics lab? I've been interested in
this, and got one of last year's students to do a little work on it. You could start by looking over
the data that were collected and seeing what the rate law is. Picking up some extra credit
wouldn't exactly hurt, either, given your last test score."
Figuring that this was not the time to admit that you had no clue about any "rate law", you
reported that afternoon to the prof's lab, and were handed the data below:
Table 1. Initial Rates as a Function of Initial Concentrations in the Formation of
Hydrazine.
EXP. | INITIAL [NH3] | INITIAL [NaOCl] | INITIAL [OH-] | INITIAL RATE M/min |
1 | 0.100 | 0.100 | 0.100 | 7.2 |
2 | 0.053 | 0.100 | 0.100 | 2.02 |
3 | 0.025 | 0.100 | 0.100 | 0.45 |
4 | 0.100 | 0.048 | 0.100 | 3.46 |
5 | 0.100 | 0.200 | 0.100 | 14.8 |
6 | 0.025 | 0.100 | 0.210 | 0.214 |
7 | 0.025 | 0.100 | 0.051 | 0.882 |
8 | 0.036 | 0.036 | 0.036 | ? |
"I never had the chance to work up these data - can you look them over, and figure out the rate
law, including the rate constant? And please fill in the rate for that last experiment, too - I hate an
unfinished table. Oh - and one more thing. Besides these initial rate studies, Morgan also ran
some concentration vs. time experiments (data given below), but as you can see, forgot to label
which reactant was monitored in each case. You'll be able to figure that out, though, after you
plot the data."
Table 2. Reactant As Concentration as a Function of Time
[A] | 0.250 | 0.246 | 0.237 | 0.226 | 0.215 | 0.206 | 0.197 | 0.189 |
t, min | 0 | 10 | 30 | 60 | 90 | 120 | 150 | 180 |
Table 3. Reactant Bs Concentration as a Function of Time
[B] | 0.250 | 0.232 | 0.202 | 0.162 | 0.131 | 0.105 | 0.0849 | 0.0683 |
t, min | 0 | 10 | 30 | 60 | 90 | 120 | 150 | 180 |
1. What is the rate law for the reactant forming hydrazine in Table 1?
2. What rate would you expect for experiment 8? Show your work.
3. How can plotting the concentration-time data let you identify which reactant goes with which data set? Which reactant is A? B?
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