Week 32

In Week 32 of Chem, we brought up our experiment from last week to go more in-depth. We noticed that during the reaction, the temperature of the test tube increased, meaning that energy left the system. This brought us back to the LOL diagrams. We now have another means of storage for energy: chemical. We incorporated the new storage account into our LOL diagrams for further examinations. So, we continued the studying of energy in these reactions. We found that when energy exits the system, making the energy of products greater than the energy of the reactants, it's exothermic. However, when energy enters a system for a reaction, making the energy of products greater than the energy of reactants, it's called endothermic. We continued to examine an experiment from a while ago when we electrolyzed copper chloride, yielding copper and chloride. Because the charge on the copper is 2+, it needs 2 electrons to make copper neutral. This loss of electrons is called oxidation. However, the 2 chloride ions have two extra electrons that they need to lose to become neutral. This gain of electrons is called reduction. These reactions together are considered coupled reactions. Electrolyzing this solution was considered a chemical electrical circuit, like a battery is. Next we moved to thermodynamics and worked with The First Law of Thermodynamics. Internal energy is the total amount of all the potential and kinetic energy that a system has. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that the change in internal energy of a system equals the sum of the heat and work. Mr. Abud won teacher of the year so wasn't able to be with us for the last two days of the week, so I will have many questions based on what we learned next week.