Lab 8: Mole Baggie Lab

Bag A6

          The purpose of this lab was to identify the contents of a bag using the bags mass and the number of moles of the compound in the bag. We were given the mass of the empty bag, a list of possibilities of what substance could be in the baggie, and the number of moles, and we massed the bag once we received it. 

          We learned that bag A6 was filled with sodium sulfide. 

          We learned that bag B2 was filled with sodium chloride. 

          To identify the compound, we first massed the baggie and subtracted the weight of its container (the baggie) which we had been given. Next, we took that number (the mass of the compound) and divided it by the number of the moles that were in the bag (information we had been given). The number that calculation produced was the atomic mass of the substance. Then, we calculated the atomic masses of the compounds that were provided for us as possibilities by finding their elemental components and proportionally adding up each one's atomic mass to get the compound's atomic mass. We then compared the unidentified compound's atomic mass to the atomic masses of the identified compounds and found that bag A6's atomic mass was most similar to sodium sulfide's atomic mass and bag B2's atomic mass was most similar to sodium chloride's atomic mass.