LAB 6D - Limiting Reactant and Percent Yield

interesting fact:
Zemmiphobia: Fear of the great mole rat.

Scary mole/cat is scary.

ANYWAYS

Today, fellow followers/readers, we did a lab once again! But this time, it was on stoichiometry - of course to summon our knowledge together to conduct a clear analysis of this chapter through an effective experiment.(Right before the test!)
I hope you know all your safety rules and no horseplay! (I'm watching you silently.)

Now I warn you, this lab is very tedious. Very. So I suggest you bring a book out just in case... (jokes of course! pay attention!)

To summarize what we did, we just obtained 25mL of sodium carbonate and calcium chloride solution in seperate graduated cylinders and poured them into one 250mL beaker. Now what do we see? It turned into a thick homogeneous white solution. We had to let it sit there for about five minutes in order to let the contents seperate into layers and suspend. Ahh you see it is a double replacement reaction - if you didn't already know.

MEANWHILE... (I better not catch you reading your book), we had to set up our apparatus! It consisted of a ring stand with a paper filter that we carefully folded into the shape of a cone. BUT before that, we had to put our names on it (IN PENCIL.. NOT PEN) and weigh the paper filter.

Now after the wait, we got to do the filtering of the precipitate and the solution! We had another beaker underneath the funnel, and we swirled the 250mL beaker with the contents before cautiously and slowly poured it into the funnel. It is important to do it in stages, and not all at once or it will be even more tedious!
Once that is completed, we took out our filter with the precipitate and placed it on a paper towel in a safe location to dry. When it dried (AKA next class), we weighed the contents with the filter paper and recorded the data.

NOW here comes the calculations/analysis:
1 Na2CO3(aq) + 1 CaCl2(aq) --> 2 NaCl(aq) + 1 CaCO3(s)

With this balanced equation, we calculated which reactant was the limited and the excess, and found the theoretical mass of the precipitate (CaCO3). With this information and the actual product (which we weighed), we used the percent yield formula (don't remember? refer to the previous posts!) to find the percent yield of the product.

.... And that concludes our lab! It was a pretty chill one :)