Crystal Lab

With the extremely busy schedule everyone has had lately, it was no surprise that I missed almost all of the formation of my crystal. I was however involved in all of the process, but lacked many pictures, except the final result.

Here are the steps for the lab:
1. obtain distilled water and put it in a beaker.
2. we put the aluminum potassium sulfate in the distilled water and mixed until it was supersaturated.
3. When there were little crystals still in the bottom of the beaker after it is completely saturated, we put the beaker on the hotplate and repeated the process. The hotter the water is the more it is able to absorb so the aluminum potassium sulfate.
4. we kept adding aluminum potassium sulfate until the heated mixture was supersaturated as well.
5. we left the mixture to cool overnight.

We returned the next day to find that there were crystal seeds all over the beaker.

We then took the seed crystal and tied it to a string, then repeated the supersaturated process.

The next day that I actually returned to this class, my crystal was pretty big and my beaker was full of tiny crystals just hanging out at the bottom.

I learned a lot about how crystals can be formed by supersaturating the distilled water. I also learned that creating crystals takes a lot of time and patience as they have to sit and cool. It's interesting to see how quickly the crystals grew overnight though, as they started out with a seed crystal about this size:

They turned into multiple crystals about this size:

This is probably one of the coolest labs I have done in chemistry. Even though it was easy and time consuming, it had a cool result that all of us got to take home with us. I definitely feel like I learned some valuable information through this lab.