burning magnesium

Burning magnesium 

Aim: to see the change in the weight of the magnesium.

Equipment: 

scales

bunsen burner 

scissor tongs 

beaker

lighter/ matches

heatproof mat

safety glasses 

Safety:

• Have your hair tied up if it is long.
• Wear safety glasses. 
• Don't go to close to the flame.
• If you forget to put on safety glasses don't look at the light of the magnesium burning.  

Method:

1. Collect your equipment and set up your heatproof mat under your bunsen burner, do not light the bunsen.
2. Once set up with all your stuff cut and put your magnesium inside the medium size beaker and weigh on your scales. (Take note of the weight.) 
3. Once you have set up and you already turn your bunsen onto safety flame, then light your bunsen burner and turn it to the blue flame. 
4. When done that take your magnesium out of your beaker and hold it with the scissor tongs.
5. You then want to hold the magnesium over the middle of the flame and wait for it to catch fire.
6. When your magnesium has caught fire you want to then put it into the beaker and wait for it to go out and turn to ash.
7. You may need to repeat this a few times.
8. When all or most of the magnesium is ash and it is inside the beaker you then want to weigh it again and compare the different weights.

Observation:

Discussion:

When I was doing this I found that you had to be very precise and careful when you weighed your magnesium because if you did it wrong or something was different then when it came to doing it again and getting the results at the end it wasn't correct. We also found out that if you don't burn all/ most the magnesium or don't get as much of the magnesium off the tongs then you will end up with the wrong results. At the start of our expement, we were using paper instead of the beakers but we found that when you put the magnesium ash onto the paper it caught fire so we decided to use the beakers instead. When doing this the magnesium is meant to get heavier than the first time you weighed it, but ours ended up getting lighter because we didn't burn all of it and we lost some of it when it got stuck to the tongs. My group started at 53.49 and we ended up with 53.39 so ours got lighter.

In therey, it should have gotten heavier.

Evaluation:

If I was to do this again then I would want to make sure I burn all the magnesium and get a more accurate result to what it should be. If you were wanting to try this then I think you need to pay close attention to the magnesium and make sure you burn most of it. I would also say that you might want to do a little bit of research on this just so you have a little bit of an idea on what you are meant to be finding out and what is actually going on when you are doing this.