Biodiesel Boat Race

After spending an entire day constructing our boats for the lab, we finally raced them today! Our boat finished but was not the fastest in the class. Speed depended on the composition of your boat and the quality of your biodiesel. The purer it is, the hotter it will burn which also makes the boat go faster. Unfortunately, the biodiesel of some groups eroded through the cups and spilled so they won't be using their own products. In the pictures below, you can see that our boats were very small as we only raced them in a rain gutter.

Biodiesel Day 2

Today we separated the biodiesel in our lab from the other useless liquids in our blend. We did this by letting it sit for a day for the solution to naturally separate first. Then we pipetted out the pure biodiesel that can be burnt. As you can see from the pictures below. we tested the fuel and it worked great!

Biodiesel Lab

Today we started the first step in our main lab of this biodiesel unit! We created a mixture of biodiesel that will be used to power a put-put boat in a race. By placing a combination of used fryer oil and potassium hydroxide in a hot water bath, we produced a blend that will have to be separated later for pure biodiesel.

Fryer oil

Hot water bath

Finished solution

Bonding Exam

After taking the exam for this unit, I felt that I did pretty well on it. Even though we had no quiz, I studied a lot with the online practice tests. They really help you get familiar with every type of problem the test will throw at you so I strongly recommend that. Additionally, I looked at my book and my notes many times before the test to help remember all the content.

Unit Over

Recently, we just finished the unit and third quarter with the unit exam. I felt that it was fairly easy when compared to others. I knew all the concepts as there were not many questions that I got stuck on. Next time I should study for tests like I did with this one by doing the online quizzes and tests.

Periodic Trends

In this lecture, we learned about different trends in the periodic table such as atomic size, ionization energy, and electronegativity. They were odd for me at first but it just took some memorization and practice to get the hang of them. Videos such as these are also helpful for understanding why trends happen.

Spectroscopic Analysis Lab

spectrophotometer
iws.collin.edu

In this lab, we used a piece of equipment called the spectrophotometer to determine the absorbance and transmittance of light with a cobalt and chromium ion in different wavelengths. The lab was pretty simple but we only had one class period to complete our data so me and my partner worked quickly. In the end, we got our data and transferred it to an Excel document to analyze it.