How Does Surface Area Affect The Rate Of Reaction

There are many factors that affect the rate of a reaction and they can either be fast or slow. The factors that affect the rate of a reaction are nature of reactants, concentration of a solution, presence of a catalyst, surface area, pressure of gases, temperature etc. These reaction rates may have positive or negative effects in our everyday lives. Today, I will be talking about how temperature, surface area and concentration can have a role in our everyday life. Firstly, a factor that affects the rate of a reaction that we see every day is temperature. We see temperature affecting rate of reactions through making food. For example, bread dough rises more quickly in a warm temperature then it does in a cooler temperature. Therefore, temperature has a faster reaction in this example when the …show more content…
Surface area may seem like it has absolutely no affect on how fast or slow reaction rate can occur but you are wrong! An example of a fast reaction rate using surface area is sugar dissolving in a hot beverage. The greater the surface area, the faster the sugar will dissolve. Smaller pieces of reactants have a greater amount of exposed surface area which will increase the effective collisions. Therefore, the rate of reactions increases. There are instances where this increase in reaction rate is not desirable. For example, coal dust in mines or even flour dust in mills can explode if a spark sets off a combustion reaction. This increase in reaction rate can prove deadly and we have seen instances where there are explosions because of this spark being set off. An example of a slow reaction rate with surface area is a sugar cube being dissolved in a hot beverage. Since this sugar cube has a small surface area it will take much longer to dissolve in the hot beverage then it would be for powdered sugar. As you can see, surface area has slow and fast reactions that occur in everyday