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students invent filter for water purification

5/25/2018

Volcanic eruption in Hawaii and Toxic Gas

5/18/2018

The book Chemistry on a Budget contains inexpensive chemistry labs that are useful with easy to obtain materials.

There are two versions of each lab, one with a ten-question conclusion and one with directions for a full lab report. This way the teacher has the option! Each lab is two pages to allow for one two-sided handout.

A 5-Star Customer Review of Chemistry on a Budget at amazon.com states:
“[S]traight forward, to the point, using household chemicals…this is the lab book for you.
I teach high school chemistry and this is exactly what [I] was looking for. Labs included simple household chemicals that could be easily found. Nice format, easy to follow along procedures, and touches on every topic of our chemistry curriculum.”

You can buy this lab book for $23 at amazon.com or lulu.com. It will take 1-2 weeks to get to you -- Order Now. It’s a great resource!

http://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-Budget-Marjorie-R-Heesemann/dp/0578129159/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389410170&sr=1-1&keywords=chemistry+on+a+budget

http://www.lulu.com/shop/marjorie-r-heesemann/chemistry-on-a-budget/paperback/product-21217600.html

*Some of you have already purchased my lab book – be sure to check out Page 141 !

“Hawaii's most active volcano, Kilauea, is erupting with a fury, and dangerous levels of sulfur dioxide gas [started erupting on 5/4/2018]. Molten lava and ash were thrown hundreds of feet into the air and onto the streets of the mountainside community near Hilo, and residents under a mandatory evacuation tried to outrun the volcano's flow. …
Residents … are now being warned about the exposure to high levels of sulfur dioxide from the lava, a gas that can cause intense coughing and burning throats. Volcano expert Paul Davis says the gas occurs during the melting process.
‘It's sort of like you've injected ammonia into all your, your nose, into your breathing area, into your throat,’ Davis said.
Hawaii has five active volcanoes, but Kilauea is the biggest. It has been in a constant state of eruption since 1983, and scientists say there is no way to predict how long this eruption will last. “
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hawaii-volcano-kilauea-eruption-residents-warned-sulfur-dioxide-exposure/

“Most commonly, sulfur causes nose, throat, and lung irritation, which leads to coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, and a tightness in the chest. Symptoms are the worst 10 to 15 minutes after exposure and improve when people are no longer in contact with the gas. Nolan says the length of time before symptoms fade depends on factors like how long someone was near the gas and how much sulfur dioxide was in the air. People who were exposed to large amounts could take several hours to improve.”
https://www.menshealth.com/health/a20268608/hawaii-volcano-kilauea-eruption/

“What is sulphur dioxide and why is it so dangerous?Sulphur dioxide is a colourless gas that has a pungent odour.
It irritates skin and the tissue and membranes of the eyes and respiratory system.

Those with respiratory illnesses can suffer from asthma like symptoms when exposed to sulphur dioxide, whilst those usually healthy experience discomfort and pneumonia like symptoms as well as difficulty breathing.
Prolonged exposure can even lead to fatalities from respiratory failure.

Sulphur dioxide emissions can also cause acid rain and air pollution, as well as producing volcanic smog (vog) which can lead to persistent health problems for those close by.
Hawaii Health Department have warned that commercially sold masks don’t protect against 'extremely dangerous gases released from the volcanic eruption.'

Scientists are monitoring the sulphur dioxide levels, and residents who live in the worst hit areas will not be allowed to return home until levels have decreased significantly. “
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/957437/hawaii-volcano-eruption-2018-leilani-estates-evacuation-sulphur-dioxide-danger-sulfur

“Short-term exposure to high levels of sulfur dioxide in the air can be life-threatening by causing breathing difficulties and obstructing airways, especially for people with lung disease. Long-term exposure to persistent levels of sulfur dioxide can cause chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and respiratory illness. It can also aggravate existing heart disease.

When sulfur dioxide reacts with other chemicals in the air to form tiny sulfate particles, these particles can gather in the lungs and cause increased respiratory problems and difficulty breathing. Long-term exposure to sulfate particles can cause respiratory disease and even premature death. …

Breathing sulfur dioxide can irritate the nose, throat, and lungs, and cause coughing and shortness of breath. Short-term exposure to sulfur dioxide can cause stomach pain, menstrual disorders, watery eyes, inhibition of thyroid function, loss of smell, headache, nausea, vomiting, fever, convulsions, and dizziness.”
https://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov/text_version/chemicals.php?id=29

“Sulfur dioxide (SO2) is a colorless, reactive air pollutant with a strong odor. This gas can be a threat to human health, animal health, and plant life.

The main sources of sulfur dioxide emissions are from fossil fuel combustion and natural volcanic activity. Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park (NP) is unique in the national park system because it sometimes has extremely high concentrations of sulfur dioxide — far higher than any other national park, or even most urban areas.”
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/air/humanhealth-sulfur.htm

“What about the other 75% of the acidity of rain? Most is accounted for by the presence of sulfuric acid (H2SO4) in rainwater. Although sulfuric acid may be produced naturally in small quantities from biological decay and volcanic activity …, it is produced almost entirely by human activity, especially the combustion of sulfur-containing fossil fuels in power plants. When these fossil fuels are burned, the sulfur contained in them reacts with oxygen from the air to form sulfur dioxide (SO2). Combustion of fossil fuels accounts for approximately 80% of the total atmospheric SO2 in the United States. The effects of burning fossil fuels can be dramatic: in contrast to the unpolluted atmospheric SO2 concentration of 0 to 0.01 ppm, polluted urban air can contain 0.1 to 2 ppm SO2, or up to 200 times more SO2! Sulfur dioxide, like the oxides of carbon and nitrogen, reacts with water to form sulfuric acid

Sulfuric acid is a strong acid, so it readily dissociates in water, to give an H+ ion and an HSO4- ion (Equation 7). The HSO4- ion may further dissociate to give H+ and SO42- (Equation 8). Thus, the presence of H2SO4 causes the concentration of H+ ions to increase dramatically, and so the pH of the rainwater drops to harmful levels.
http://www.chemistry.wustl.edu/~edudev/LabTutorials/Water/FreshWater/acidrain.html

“If winds weaken, that gas and other volcanic pollutants can settle easily with moisture and dust to create a haze called volcanic smog, or "vog," with tiny sulfuric acid droplets that can pose respiratory problems, according to the US Geological Survey. “
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/09/us/hawaii-kilauea-volcano-acid-rain/index.html

According to a report in the Hawaii News on 5/8/18, “Some Hawaii island residents were showing early signs of respiratory illness over the weekend as the lava from Kilauea Volcano expanded its footprint in the Leilani Estates subdivision.

State Sen. Josh Green (D, Kona-Kau), an emergency room physician, said he treated area residents who were experiencing the effects from vog that blew through a Pahoa shelter as the wind shifted in that direction. Symptoms included thick mucus, heavy cough and burning in the lungs, throat and nose. Some with underlying lung disease even needed to use inhalers, and at least one elderly woman needed an oxygen tank, he said. …

The [Hawaii] state Health Department warned residents this week that commercial masks sold in stores do not protect against ‘extremely dangerous gases released from the volcanic eruption.’ The gases consist of several different chemicals, dust and particles that include sulfur dioxide.”
http://www.staradvertiser.com/2018/05/09/hawaii-news/sulfur-dioxides-toxic-effects-being-monitored/

Past Acid-Base blog posts include:
04/09/2014       Acids, Bases & Salts – Intro
04/13/2014       Acids & Bases – Arrhenius theory and pH
04/16/2014       Acids & Bases – Bronsted-Lowry
                                                        and K-acid
04/24/2014       Acids & Bases – Titration
04/30/2014       Acids & Bases – Lewis Theory & Buffers
05/08/2016       The Chemistry of Baking Soda

*This Blog contains several entries that would be helpful to your chemistry classroom. Check out the Topic List to help you to find past Blog entries.

Also, Write To Me about your successes, challenges, or questions in the Chemistry Classroom.

Remember, buying a copy of the lab book Chemistry on a Budget can be very useful to your Chemistry classroom with labs and class article ideas.

Have a great weekend!

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Water-based battery stores solar and wind energy

5/11/2018

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The book Chemistry on a Budget contains inexpensive chemistry labs that are useful with easy to obtain materials.

There are two versions of each lab, one with a ten-question conclusion and one with directions for a full lab report. This way the teacher has the option! Each lab is two pages to allow for one two-sided handout.

A 5-Star Customer Review of Chemistry on a Budget at amazon.com states:
“[S]traight forward, to the point, using household chemicals…this is the lab book for you.
I teach high school chemistry and this is exactly what [I] was looking for. Labs included simple household chemicals that could be easily found. Nice format, easy to follow along procedures, and touches on every topic of our chemistry curriculum.”

You can buy this lab book for $23 at amazon.com or lulu.com. It will take 1-2 weeks to get to you -- Order Now. It’s a great resource!

http://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-Budget-Marjorie-R-Heesemann/dp/0578129159/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389410170&sr=1-1&keywords=chemistry+on+a+budget

http://www.lulu.com/shop/marjorie-r-heesemann/chemistry-on-a-budget/paperback/product-21217600.html

*Some of you have already purchased my lab book – be sure to check out Page 141 !

“Stanford [University] researchers have developed a water-based battery that could provide a cheap way to store wind or solar energy generated when the sun is shining and wind is blowing so it can be fed back into the electric grid and be redistributed when demand is high.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180430160428.htm

“The prototype manganese-hydrogen battery, reported in Nature Energy, stands just three inches tall and generates a mere 20 milliwatt hours of electricity, which is on par with the energy levels of LED flashlights that hang on a key ring. Despite the prototype's diminutive output, the researchers are confident they can scale up this table-top technology to an industrial-grade system that could charge and recharge up to 10,000 times, creating a grid-scale battery with a useful lifespan well in excess of a decade.

Yi Cui, a professor of materials science at Stanford and senior author on the paper, said manganese-hydrogen battery technology could be one of the missing pieces in the nation's energy puzzle - a way to store unpredictable wind or solar energy so as to lessen the need to burn reliable but carbon-emitting fossil fuels when the renewable sources aren't available. "What we've done is thrown a special salt into water, dropped in an electrode, and created a reversible chemical reaction that stores electrons in the form of hydrogen gas," Cui said.”
https://www.offgridenergyindependence.com/articles/14210/water-based-battery-to-store-solar-and-wind-energy

“Wei Chen, a postdoctoral scholar in Cui’s lab, led the team that dreamed up the concept and built the prototype. In essence, the researchers coaxed a reversible electron-exchange between water and manganese sulfate, a cheap, abundant industrial salt used to make dry cell batteries, fertilizers, paper, and other products.

To mimic how a wind or solar source might feed power into the battery, the researchers attached a power source to the prototype. The electrons flowing in reacted with the manganese sulfate dissolved in the water to leave particles of manganese dioxide clinging to the electrodes. Excess electrons bubbled off as hydrogen gas, storing that energy for future use.

Engineers know how to re-create electricity from the energy stored in hydrogen gas so the important next step was to prove that they can recharge the water-based battery.
The researchers did this by re-attaching their power source to the depleted prototype, this time with the goal of inducing the manganese dioxide particles clinging to the electrode to combine with water, replenishing the manganese sulfate salt. Once this process restored the salt, incoming electrons became surplus, and excess power could bubble off as hydrogen gas, in a method that can be repeated again and again and again.

Cui estimates that, given the water-based battery’s expected lifespan, it would cost a penny to store enough electricity to power a 100-watt lightbulb for twelve hours.”
http://energymetalnews.com/2018/05/02/water-based-battery-stores-green-energy-for-later/

“Wind turbines operate on a simple principle. The energy in the wind turns two or three propeller-like blades around a rotor. The rotor is connected to the main shaft, which spins a generator to create electricity.”
https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/how-do-wind-turbines-work

“Photovoltaics is the direct conversion of light into electricity at the atomic level. Some materials exhibit a property known as the photoelectric effect that causes them to absorb photons of light and release electrons. When these free electrons are captured, an electric current results that can be used as electricity.”
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2002/solarcells/

“The prototype needs development work to prove itself. For one thing it uses platinum as a catalyst to spur the crucial chemical reactions at the electrode that make the recharge process efficient, and the cost of that component would be prohibitive for large-scale deployment. But Chen said the team is already working on cheaper ways to coax the manganese sulfate and water to perform the reversible electron exchange.”
http://www.newscaf.com/technology/water-based-battery-stores-solar-and-wind-energy_922350.html

This is a real-life application of a redox process -- you might want to analyze the reactions in your class.

Past blog posts about Electrochemistry include:

05/04/2014        Electrochemistry – Redox Basics
05/07/2014        Electrochemistry – Balancing Redox
                             Reactions
05/14/2014        Electrochemistry – Electrochemical Cells
05/18/2014        Electrochemistry – Electrolytic Cells
05/07/2015        Penny Battery
04/07/2017        Electrochemistry Research Articles’
04/28/2017        New Battery Coating
07/14/2017        Using Redox to Clean Rust

*This Blog contains several entries that would be helpful to your chemistry classroom. Check out the Topic List to help you to find past Blog entries.

Also, Write To Me about your successes, challenges, or questions in the Chemistry Classroom.

Remember, buying a copy of the lab book Chemistry on a Budget can be very useful to your Chemistry classroom with labs and class article ideas.

Have a great weekend!

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white roads in los angeles ca

5/4/2018

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students invent filter for water purification

Volcanic eruption in Hawaii and Toxic Gas

Water-based battery stores solar and wind energy

white roads in los angeles ca

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