5 Home Experiments That You can do in Stoichiometry, Real Life

Hi folks, have you ever thought you can understand the concepts of stoichiometry just by performing some easy experiments at your home??

Now this sound interesting as now I will not ask you to calculate anything like the numericals but I will only ask you to observe some phenomenon more attentively which will make you feel  how can you make an analogy with stoichiometry.

Quite interesting images right??

So you see how important it is to keep a perfect ratio of the constituents in forming a compound else just suppose your toothpaste is more salty and then you will always say “ haan mere toothpaste me namak hai” 😀 :D  haha

On a similar note I am going to tell you some home experiments which will make you feel confident to understand the word stoichiometry in a physical sense and you will love solving problems based on stoichiometry.

First have a look at this equation: 

Now this equation says if I take 2 moles of A and 3 mole of B, then I will get 1 mole of C. Here 2,3 and 1 are the stoichiometric coefficients of A, B and C respectively.

What if I add more A or more B . Would I get more C or same C . It totally depends on the way the reactants combine and then you will understand one basic term “Limiting Reagent” in the reaction.

1)  Kitchen – Ever make tea?

Now this sounds quite easy and I hope all of you must have made tea once at least in your life. Now when you were making tea the amount of milk , tea leaves and sugar must be in your mind that how much you have to add to get a perfect Tea . Now do one easy experiment ( and do this when your parents are not at home 😀 )

Add more sugar once and taste it . Next time add more tea leaves and taste it. You will find that if this experiment would have been carried out in the presence of your parents, they would have scolded you and beaten you up. 😀 😀

So basically what do we understand by this experiment is that the quantity matters for the products which we have to form .

Coming to the equation  

, here also If instead of 2 moles of A I take 10 moles of A, then this is not the case that I will get more C. I will get only 1 mole of C. Rest of the A will be there as it is in the system.

Let’s now move on to 2^nd experiment

2)  Washing of clothes

Washing of clothes is yet another experiment performed at home which you observe carefully will tell you the stoichiometry analogy.In this experiment I want you again to work over two things. First add more amount of detergent than you add regularly and next you add more water than regular.

If you perform the experiment like this , you will observe that the amount of lather getting produced is much less than the regular case and your clothes will not get washed up in a better way.

I hope you understand now the importance of the equation used.So always remember stoichiometry matters a lot in the product formation.  Now after learning this much lets understand a beautiful term “ Limiting Reagent”.

3)  Salt in the food

Whenever you mom cooks the food ,  the most important ingredient which she adds is the common salt may be “Tata Salt”, “Annapurna Salt” etc. etc.  Now no matter about the other ingredients but if the salt which is used is not in an appropriate amount then the food will never be tasty.

So salt is the limiting reagent of your food.Always remember limiting reagent is the reagent used in chemical reaction which determines the product and gets consumed totally (just like the salt gets uniformly distributed).
I hope you understand now what is limiting reagent.

4)  I know u love sandwiches

Let’s say  you want to prepare a BLT sandwich.Assuming you have an infinite supply of bread, you need two strips of bacon per sandwich, a slice of “mater” and a leaf of lettuce.

You can get ~ 6-8 slices in one tomato, 24 slices in a pack of bacon, and 20-30 leafs on a head of lettuce.  Let’s say  you want to prepare a BLT sandwich. Assuming you have an infinite supply of bread, you need two strips of bacon per sandwich, a slice of “mater” and a leaf of lettuce.

You can get ~ 6-8 slices in one tomato, 24 slices in a pack of bacon, and 20-30 leafs on a head of lettuce.

5)   Automobile  making (wanna become Mechanical engineers??)

Car analogy: For each car you need 4 wheels, 1 steering wheel, and 2 doors

equation:
4 wheels + 1 steering wheel + 2 doors –> car
With this simple example you will see how easy is to understand limiting reagent.

Stoichiometry problem. If you have 19 wheels 2 steering wheels and 10 doors, what is the “limiting reagent”?

Answer: 2 steering wheels.

I hope you got it. J

In this way stoichiometry and its problems will look easy to you now and you will start solving them lovingly.

I hope this blog helps you in understand the basic fundas of stoichiometry.

Name: Suraj Prasad

Description: Suraj Prasad, B.Tech. Graduate in Electrical Engineering from IIT Patna and associated with askIITians Since 4 yrs. as Chemistry Expert. He believes Learning is an art which can be grasped by doing practice and get familiarize with the Science around. He is most renowned Faculty at askIITians and favorite of his students because of the awesome tips and tricks which he always provides to students in the session (not only in Chemistry but Physics and Mathematics as well). He has even made Chemistry easy and interesting for those Students who in the beginning used to hate it just by adding some humor to the subject so that student never gets bored and are able to retain the things in mind for a long time. Chemistry has become piece of cake to his students and they feel happy while solving Chemistry problems.

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