A previous …show more content…
The best candidate for this outcome was strontium nitrate. Two airtight plastic containers were filled with samples of the same species of leaves. Two 50-mL beakers were filled with 25-mL of sodium hydroxide both were placed into each container. One of the containers was drizzled with a 4-mL of deionized water while the other was drizzled with an equal part of 20% fertilizer solution. The container was sealed airtight and incubated for a week. Throughout the incubation period the resulting equation transpired:
CO2 (g) + 2NaOH (aq) → Na2CO3 (aq) + H2O (l) Once the incubation period was finished, the beakers were obtained and the solution was titrated to find the amount of sodium hydroxide remaining in each of the samples. In order to find this amount and back titration was performed with 1.0209 M hydrochloric acid. The same reaction was used again to determine the amount of carbon dioxide emitted:
2NaOH (aq) + CO2 (g) → Na2CO3 (aq) + H2O (l) Sodium carbonate may react with the hydrochloric acid during the back titration process causing us to remove the compound with the precipitation of the carbonate ions with strontium nitrate, which allowed for hydroxide to still be present. This cause the following …show more content…
However, originally I expected a more significance in the margins, some of the data, including my own recorded, which is highlighted in table 2, showed the leaf samples without fertilizer had a higher grams of leaves for each day. This suggests that the recorded data from this specific study was not indicative of the overall study.
The outcome may be due to the species of leaves I used, cherry leaves, which may have altered the results due to their own specific chemical make up. Different species of leaves tend to have varying amounts of decomposition. Any microorganisms feeding off of the decay of leaves may have been another possible factor, which would have altered the titration process. Most of the studies read over used as references also incubated their leaf decay for longer amounts of time, sometimes over a month of decay 4,5,6. This incubation period may have been a major contributing factor to the data. Other studies have found that high amounts of carbon dioxide present during leaf decomposition have affected leaf composition