During this project, we were given a very broad and vague task, to create a new art piece for the incoming STEM building. This would challenge us to use our creativity by deciding ourselves on a design that would be unique and stand out among the rest.
Our group decided to make a type of colored smoke by mixing different materials in order to make a smokey entrance of green and gold to welcome people into the building. It would come in a portable frame to move around for sports games as well. We focused more on the smoke part in this project, as we built a small prototype of what the frame would look like instead. This smoke would be created using a combustion reaction and would supposedly come out, one batch in green, and the other in gold. |
Some of our early materials and smoke composition is listed in the document below. These were more preliminary and were eventually changed later due to the mixture itself not working as well as we would have liked.
Our final presentation was shown to the class and also contains a video of the smoke working, although it wasn't perfect, the output was still quite a lot and could be refined in the future.
Content
This project contained many different chemicals and processes, as well as reactions. These are listed above in the slideshow and the preliminary doc.
- Chemical Reaction - The process when one or more substances are changed into one or more different substances. These include:
- Single Replacement Reaction - A reaction in which one element replaces another element in a compound
- Double Replacement Reaction - A reaction when two ionic compounds exchange ions, producing two new compounds, two compounds are reactants and two are products
- Synthesis Reaction - A reaction in which multiple reactants combine to form a single product, this is an exothermic reaction as it releases energy in the form of heat and light
- Decomposition Reaction - A reaction in which a compound breaks down into two or more simpler substances, this is an endothermic reaction as it requires an input of energy in the form of heat, light, or electricity
- Combustion Reaction - A reaction between any combustible material and an oxidizer to form an oxidized product
- Balancing Chemical Equations - In order to balance a chemical reaction, they must have the same number and type of each atom on both sides of the equation, the coefficients of a balanced equation must be the simplest whole number ratio. Mass is always conserved
- Ionic Charge - The electrical charge of an ion, created by gaining or losing one or more electrons from an atom or group of atoms
- Precipitate - An insoluble solid that emerges from a liquid solution, when the reaction known as precipitation occurs (the creation of a solid from a solution), the solid that is formed in the liquid solution is called the precipitate
Reflection
I think that in this project I did an exceptional job keeping the team going and motivating myself to work. I did a great deal of at home work for this project, going out of my way in order to buy oil pastels and create the smoke at home. The video on the slideshow is actually taken from my backyard funnily enough. I had to work a lot with my group, making sure that everyone was doing their assigned task, which went pretty well. We had everything in place by the presentation day and I thought that we did quite well. The things that I would try to fix are creating an actual life sized model of our project in order to give people a better view on what it would be like. The other would be to have our smoke be actually colored, although the smoke produced was in large amounts, the color itself was usually gray, black, or white. This had to do with the temperature inside of the can being either too high or too low for the combustion reaction to take place perfectly. In the future, I would try to find some way in order to refine this and make it look a lot nicer. In the end, this project went extremely well and I think that we did a good job.