Practical Electrochemistry

Today, we made some half-cells and combined them with a salt-bridge and a voltmeter. Then, we were asked to make sense of our observations.

Standard Electrode Potentials and EMF

This is a big idea and we will spend the rest of the week exploring it:

1. What are standard electrode potentials?
2. How are they used to find the EMF of a cell?
3. What happens if a cell has a negative EMF?
4. How can EMF be used to predict what would be observed in a redox reaction?
5. How can standard electrode potentials be used to rank oxidant- and reductant-strength?

Electrochemical Cells - Introduction

We started the lesson by making an electrochemical cell using zinc chloride, a zinc electrode, copper (II) sulfate, a copper electrode. We found that this generated about 1.4V

Electrolysis

Electricity can be used to split compounds up into their elements. This is an example of oxidation-reduction.

Redox Half Equations

Balancing Redox Half Equations

Another recap of Level 2 work...

Thanks to Sam for finding these FLASH CARDS

Logan found these FLASH CARDS which are also excellent.

Oxidation Numbers

This is just a recap of last year's work. We discussed the allocation of oxidation numbers: