Thursday, January 27, 2011

Hess' Law

The class started off today with Liebs showing us the experiment that failed yesterday. He was showing us how the process of sublimation could change to fusion. In order to do so he put frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice, under "intense" amounts of pressure.

Once the dry ice melted under the water, it would pop under the pressure and send water everywhere, which was terrifying to some of the people in our class... so this is is the same thing, but without the "pop".



Moving onto the lecture today, we spent the rest of class discussing something called Hess' Law. Hess' Law basically says that you can use multiple ways to find Hess' Law, and it will still work, as long as you come to same, correct conclusion.

"If you ski down a hill, it doesn't matter the path you take, you're still going to get to the bottom. As long as you don't hit a tree."


Basically you are given a formula, and you must add and subtract a series of other equations to match it, and then do the same process to series' delta H's in order to find the original missing delta H. To change the equations you can do one of two things: you can flip the formulas around or multiply their coefficients by a number. When adding the equations, if they are on the opposite side of the arrow and the same element/compound they cancel. If they are on the same side then they combine.

An example:

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