Co2 Density Lab

The purpose of this lab was to measure the mass and volume of CO2 gas and calculate its density. To conduct this experiment, the group must have made sure that when moving the collecting bottle, the mouth of the bottle is covered by a group member’s hand. Also, the rubber tube must be taken out from the collecting bottle before taking out the stopper on the test tube. During this experiment, it was determined that it is important to keep the mouth of the collecting bottle covered with a group member’s hand while removing it from the water in order for nothing to come out and nothing to come in, keeping it a closed system. It was also determined that the volume of displaced water in the collecting bottle is the same as the volume of the gas because they both took

The group determined the CO2 gas to be around 2.4x10-3. This was determined by measuring the mass and volume of the gas and then calculating with the density formula. When comparing with the class data, the group’s data was proved to be an outlier. There was not an extremely strong trend within the class, however, most groups got the result of either 1.8x10-3 or 2.0x10-3 as the density of the CO2 gas, which would create an average result of 1.9x10-3. This suggests that the density of a gas can be calculated by the displacement of water, assuming that the gas collected in the bottle was not partially dissolved in the water. An error that had been encountered by the group was that the tube was accidentally pulled out of the collecting bottle while the reaction was occurring in the test tube, causing the group to lose some of the gas to the surrounding air before the tube was inserted back into the collecting bottle. This error caused the volume of the gas collected to appear lower than the volume of the gas that was released in