Aluminum lab report

Aluminum lab report

“9th B”

Student: Rebecca Wheeler Ruiz

Teacher: Miss Katherine Darnell

 [pic 1]

Question of inquiry:

Can we determine the thickness and volume of a flat object by using only the measurements of length, height, density and mass?

Introduction:

Aluminum foil is something we use in our everyday lives, we use it to wrap our lunch, make casseroles or even make our alien invasion hats. Yet it has happened to me that when I’m wrapping my sandwich to go to school it breaks. This is because aluminum foil is really thin. Before this lab I had no idea that you could measure exactly or close to it how thin. And this is exactly the purpose of this lab was to get the thickness of aluminum foil using only raw data like mass, density, height, and length to get the volume and thickness of the foil.

Background information:          

Thickness is one of the measurements to calculate the volume according to the Miriam Webster dictionary it is the distance between two opposite sides of an object and it is used along with length and height to be able to calculate the volume of an object, what is the volume of an object?  According to Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D. “Volume is the quantity of three-dimensional space occupied by a liquid, solid, or gas.” of course there is another way to calculate the volume: by multiplying the mass of an object times the density of such object. That is what we did in this lab.                                                    

Procedure:                                                                                                                 2.                                                                                 [pic 2]

Materials:

1. Ruler
2. 9 sheets of aluminum foil                                     5.                        4.
3. Triple beam balance
4. Calculator                                                      1.                                  [pic 3]
5. Pen and paper                                                                            

• Our chemistry book (to look up the density of the substance)                                    3.          The first thing that happened in this lab was that the teacher cut                                                   a couple of pieces of aluminum foil and named them a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i. she told us that we had to find the thickness of density using only the measurements we could get with our materials. Fist my team and I took the mass of our first piece of aluminum foil with the triple beam balance and registered it on our data table, then we searched in our book the density of aluminum foil. We used both these measurements to calculate the volume by multiplying both. After doing this and registering all of it on our data table, we grabbed our rulers and took the height and length of our strips of aluminum foil of course recording everything. By doing this we would have everything we needed to get the thickness: volume, length and height. The procedure to get the thickness was quite simple all we needed to do was clear the equation to get X (the thickness).

For example:[pic 4][pic 5]

[pic 6][pic 7][pic 8][pic 9]

Data:

Raw data:

 This is the data that we registered before doing any calculations.

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