We realized this week that there is not an infinite supply of Zinc Nitrate! It's all fun and games until you run out of the most important chemical in your experiment and there isn't enough time to order more...RIP. With that luck, we also ran out of steel and zinc sheet metal. You would have thought we would be better at planning ahead. Johanna took a trip to Home Depot to look for steel and zinc. She was only able to find steel, but it was at the cost of her beautifully even skin. Turns out, steel is more dangerous than Zinc Nitrate!
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Pre-Trials are over, and now we have a much better sense of what will and will not work in this experiment. We have found that a power source with a controllable voltage and current is completely necessary, and we now have one. We have found that with a higher controlled voltage (approximately 3 V) it only takes a few seconds for zinc to electroplate onto steel. In accordance with our pre-experimentaion, and with Faraday's Law, we will be using time and current as the factors in our experiment.
We have also found that plated steel in distilled water, rather than saltwater or acetic acid, actually yields the quickest measurable results. While this will be helpful for experimentation, we are disappointed that this eliminates both the idea of galvanic corrosion and acid corrosion. However, we have found that the experiment has been more complex than we originally believed that it was, so it is for the better that we change the experiment in this way. Metals have many properties, one common property being strength. Consequently, metals are used to accomplish many purposes. Scientists and engineers continue to study metals and their potential properties with hopes to find better used or solution to various projects that are more economical without robbing quality. Though metals are strong and powerful, they are not perfect. Metals can corrode. Metals corrode through a process called oxidation, where a metal's atoms are robbed of their electrons. When metals because oxidized, they lose strength and malleability; many properties of the metal change at this point. There are many processes that induce the corrosion of metals, such as galvanic corrosion and sulfide corrosion. For this research project, we decided to focus on sulfide corrosion because it a huge problem in places where the sulfide concentration is high in the air or water. Metal panels on ships corrode within the presence of sulfide polluted water or acid rain. The researchers wanted to know if factors controlled during the electroplating process of a metal have a significant affect on the corrosion resistance of the plated metal.
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