Wednesday, May 4, 2011

4th Blog


Today, my classmates and I cleaned the oil for the first time. First, we duct taped a cheese cloth on to a big funnel so it would be easier to pour the oil into beakers. Then, we poured the oil through the funnel and into the beakers. Once that was done, we wiped the beakers clean before we moved them onto hot plates. We had about 8 beakers on the hot plates. Cooking thermometers were used to see how hot the oils were. They were supposed to boil up to 100 degrees Celsius, but all the beakers were around 30 degrees Celsius the whole class period. It turned out that the whole power wasn’t on. Our class over used the electricity and caused for the hot plates to shut down. Technically, the only thing we got done today was pouring the filtered oil into the beakers. The cheese cloth that we used was very ineffective. It got rid of some chunks, but it did not get rid of all of them. I learned that filtering and getting rid of everything unnecessary is really hard and that cheese cloth only gets rid of some of the chunks. For tomorrow, our class could try using a coffee filter and dividing the class into 2 teams so that we can get work done faster. (Ex: Pouring team and Heating team)

This is a picture of a funnel:













This is a picture of a hot plate:











This is a picture of a cooking thermometer: 

1 comment:

  1. This post is very descriptive and used many pictures to help my imagination interact with your experiment as if i was with you guys while completing the experiment.

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