Phosphorus Lab

During this lab, my main goal was to discover exactly how much phosphorus (or phosphate) is in the composition of plant food, or in the case of the Guided Inquiry portion of the lab, in two different brands of plant food. If I put it in the most concise way possible, to do this, I carried out quite a few processes that caused the components of the plant food to separate from each other. Basically, I got the phosphorus, along with some other substances, to form as a precipitate. Next, through a filtering method, I was able to isolate the aqueous solution (the one that the precipitate formed in) from the solid, yet very fine, precipitate. Now, with the two separated from one another, I was then capable of performing a series of calculations to unearth everything that I needed to know, such as the amount of moles of phosphorus that could be found in the plant food, the amount of P2O5 in grams that could be …show more content…
Well, it depends on what you’re talking about, exactly. For instance, if you are talking about pure phosphorus, then the value we ended up with after going through all of the necessary calculations is 1.306 * 10-3 moles of phosphorus. The actual value I got when determining it was 0.001306 moles of phosphorus, but writing it the other way made it much easier to fit on the table, and it is simply more appealing to look at. On the other hand, if you are more concerned with the amount of P2O5 that obtained from the experiment and our calculations, then the value we received is 0.0927 grams of P2O5, which would mean that our results say that 9.27 percent of the sample of plant food we tested is P2O5. However, this is not the value the plant food label gives us. According to the description that tells us the components of the plant food on the back of the box, there should only be 8 percent P2O5. Due to this, we have a percentage error estimated to be 15.9