Lab 1B

Prompt: Write a brief post that details the procedure you designed for Part II: Determining the Thickness of Aluminum Foil. Include information on how you determined the thickness, and be sure to include your thickness in mm.


To determine the thickness of the aluminum foil, we first had to do part 1 of the procedure which was calculating the density of aluminum by using an aluminum block. To find the density, we first had to find the volume. We did this by using the water displacement method, which is where you have a graduated cylinder with water to a certain measurement and after dropping the object you are trying to find the volume of in the water, you calculate the increase in the measurement of the water. The increase is the objects volume.Our aluminum object had a volume of 23 mL. Next we weighed the object on a scale. The mass of our object was 67.48 g. Using the mass and volume we had found, we were able to calculate the density using the density formula(d=m/v). The density of our object was 2.9 g/cm^3. 
Now that we knew the density of aluminum we could begin part II. We began by setting up the density equation, except instead of volume we put the equation for volume, so it looked like this: density=mass/length x height x width. At this point we could only insert in the 2.9 we had found as the density of aluminum in the density location in the equation. We then measured the length and height of the aluminum foil, which were 11.1 cm for length and 9.9 cm for height. Next we weighed the aluminum foil which had a mass of.45 grams. So now our equation was: 2.9=.45/ 11.1 x 9.9 x width. With that we were able to calculate the equation using the steps detailed in the picture. The answer we got was in centimeters, so we then moved the decimal point one to the right to account for that giving us a final answer of .014 mm for the width of our aluminum foil.