Magnesium Lab

In my chemistry class, we performed a lab to see how much magnesium weighs(both burnt and in metal form), as well as how conductive it is. We used the following materials: crucible, ribbon of magnesium, scale, and a gas torch. We weighed the crucible by itself, it came to 11.61g. We also weighed the crucible and magnesium together before putting it under the gas torch, that turned out to be 12.01g. By subtracting both of those weights, we found that the magnesium ribbon piece(without heat) we used was approximately .60g. We put the crucible with the magnesium inside over the gas torch. It took a while for the crucible to get hot enough for the magnesium to start to burn, but when it did, the magnesium burned incredibly bright, it was almost blinding. The magnesium burned to an ash; at this point, we weighed both the crucible and the ash together, that came to 12.17g. Subtracting the crucible alone from that weight, the ash itself only weighs .56g. Out of all of this, we learned how magnesium behaves under heat. Below is a picture of how bright magnesium actually gets under heat.

Metal Activity Lab

In my chemistry class, we tested how reactive or non-reactive metals are. Specifically, we tested three different metals: magnesium, zinc, and copper. For testing, we used magnesium ribbon, zinc granules, and copper(III) pebbles. We had a 24 well plate and we organized a series of nitrates contained in pipets in columns of four rows: copper nitrate in one, magnesium nitrate in the second, silver nitrate the third, and zinc nitrate in the fourth. In each of the 4 wells in the row, we placed a small amount of all the metals in each to see exactly how reactive each metal would be.
After waiting 5 minutes for the metals to react, we found that magnesium reacted with the most solutions and that copper reacted with the least solutions. Zinc was right in the middle of magnesium and copper. After doing this lab, we learned that the Statue of Liberty was actually made out of copper so that it wouldn't corrode as easily since it reacts with the least amount of solutes.

Above is a series of elements organized from most reactive to least, to show that the data that we retrieved is, indeed, correct.