How different temperatures affect the rate of diffusion of a dye into a flower

1. How different temperatures affect the rate of diffusion of a dye into a flower By: Ximena Cruz, Silvana Rivas, Kathy Galdamez and Julio Butter.

2. What are we searching for? • We want to find out which dye is absorbed quicker by the flower. • Plus we are searching for the specific heat capacity of each dye.

3. Variables • Control Variables:

4. Independent Variable

5. Dependent Variable

6. Our Method

7. Room Temperature • Pour 1 ml of red colorant into the beaker 2) Measure the temperature of the dye 3) Put in the flower and immediately start the stopwatch 4) Repeat the steps for the green and blue dye 5) Stop the stopwatch once you see the color is abundant in the petals

8. 1°C Temperature (Decrease the temperature using ice) • Measure 100ml of red colorant and pour it into a beaker 2) Pour ice in the beaker until it is filled (usually 3 ice cubes used) 3) Measure the temperature 4) Repeat steps with blue and green dye 5) Once the beakers have reached 1°C in temperature, put the flowers into the beaker and start the stop watches

9. Heated Temperature (90°C) • Repeat steps 1-3 from room temperature method • Prepare bunsen burner and take the temperature of the dyes • Using a thermometer, heat the red dye with the flower until it reaches 90° • Repeat steps 1-3 but with different dyes

10. Results

11. Graph

12. Conclusion: High Temperature • When temperature rose to 90°C the only flower that changed was the one in blue dye. Thesepals of alltheflowerslookedbrownaroundtheedges. Theblue color dye has lowspecificheatcapacity and this causes ittogainenergyfaster and risethetemperature. So moleculeshave more energymakingiteasiertodiffuseintothefloweragainstthedyingratetheflower has. Red and greenhave a highheatcapacity so itcouldnotdiffusefastenough so theflowerbecamedenaturedbythe time the color dyewasdiffusing and couldnotabsorbthe color.

13. Conclusion: low temperature • The first dye absorbed by the flower was the green one, followed by the blue and red. • As we are mixing ice(water) with dyes, it makes the diffusion procedure to be easier. We found out that cold temperatures are optimum temperature for flowers to absorb. • The reason for these is that we believe that the molecules of the green dyes are smaller than the blue and the red. • Given that in low temperature molecules have less energy for them to move, as it has a smaller surface area it uses less heat therefore it needs less heat to move, making it to diffuse in a faster rate.

14. Evaluation • When heating the temperature, we set the limit to high by letting rise to 90°C, we should have done a lower temperature like 70°C because then the flower could have actually survived and absorb the dyes easierly. This would have made it easy to compare the heated flower with the room temperature and the low temperature flowers. • Another problem was that we cut the stems to late. Given that we saw it didn’t absorbed the dye quickly with 20cm, we then cut it to 10cm but we should have done it from the start.

15. Evaluation • The tubes of the bunsen burners were not well adjust and this cause the table to catch fire which violated the safety measures. • Instead of using pink roses it would have been better to use white roses to see if the effect of colouring the dyes took the same time in diffusing as it did with the white carnations.

16. Pictures • http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=85852&id=503107557&saved