Chemical Process of Recycling Aluminum Into Alum

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Chemical Process of Recycling Aluminum into Alum Experiment 4, Section 510, Kelsey Bloom (primary author), Luis Banuelos Introduction Reducing, reusing, and recycling have become a common goal for American society in recent years due to the earth’s depleting resources. Since aluminum, especially cans, is one of the most often used metals in day to day life, many efforts have been made to chemically recycle used aluminum. In this experiment, alum was synthesized from aluminum through four sequential chemical reactions. The recycling process, demonstrated by the experiment, significantly reduces the energy used to produce aluminum cans. Materials and Methods At the start of the lab, approximately grams of aluminum can pieces were weighed, recorded, and placed in a 250mL beaker. Next, 50 mL of 1.4 M KOH solution were added to the aluminum pieces in the beaker. During this reaction, a fume hood was used to vent the gas released by the reaction out of the laboratory. The reaction was sped up by slowly applying heat using a hot plate. An aspirator was set up in order to filter the mixture. The vacuum source was turned on and the filter paper was wet with distilled water. After completely reacted, the KOH and aluminum product was poured through the filter. The beaker was rinsed with 5mL of water and poured through the filter again. This process was repeated once more and the resulting filtrate was poured into a clean 250mL beaker. The filter flask was rinsed with 10mL of distilled water. The rinse was poured into the reaction beaker and the beaker was cooled in an ice bath. 20mL of 6.0 M sulfuric acid was slowly added to the cooled reaction mixture while being stirred. The mixture was heated to dissolve any solids and then the mixture was filtered in the same process as before. After filtering, the reaction mixture was poured into a clean beaker and put in an ice bath

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